At Home With The Failbox 360

The Microsoft XBox 360 is the most unreliable gaming system(30-50%), plaguing users with the Red Ring Of Death, scratched discs, poor license transfers, and many more maladies we aren't temporally aware of.  So why in the world would Das Bloggy Blog buy one?

Well, in addition to playing The Orange Box, it streams video files from your computer to your TV.  We'll say this again:  movies on your hard drive can be played via your wireless network.  Wow.  This means less time watching the fucking Food Network and hearing Marc Summers intonate dumb shit like it is genius.  We set this up on our roommates' launch-age 360 and it worked great for years.  The connection would sometimes go out momentarily when the computer you were streaming from was also downloading -- but on the whole it was awesome.  When our roommates were awarded primary custody of the 360 at the divorce hearings, we decided to buy our own so we could continue this.  We even made sure to buy our 360s from a retailer known to be shipping Jasper-chip equipped consoles.

We haven't gotten the RRoD -- but we are having an epic failure trying to use the 360 for the purpose of which we bought it.  Out of the box we were streaming in less than an hour, but the next day we were foiled by a persistent Status Code: 53-C00DF238.  Lots of other people also have this problem, but there is no clear solution, and none of the proposed ones work.  The only way we've been able to get around it is to remove the 'optional media update' that enables DivX and XVid playback, reset both the console and computer, then reinstall the 'optional media update'.  However, the next day, we are back to Status Code: 53-C00DF238.

XBox email support has been very helpful, telling us to make sure that our computers are on and running media sharing software.  Thanks a million, guys.  We're not sure calling CS and getting a ticket started is the best thing to do for an otherwise-functioning unit -- not much good comes out of the repair-service wormhole.  So for now, we're watching Iron Chef, and yes, we've already seen it and the iron chef wins this one.