I purchased my Mediasmart right before the holidays.  I had grand visions of what would happen with it as at the same time my home was finished being built.  I moved in and immediately set to getting my man cave up to par.  55in Samsung LED TV and high end surround sound were installed and things were starting to look ready for the final setup.  I setup my EX490 and immeddiately upgraded the processor to a Core 2 Duo E8400 (3.0ghz).  Purchased 3 2tb drives and installed them.  Purchased a PX-B310U external blu-ray player so I could rip my DVD's to my home PC and then share it out from there to the server and from there to my new setup. 

Here's where the fun and excitement ended and the headaches and frustrations began.  For starters, I'm smart and far from an idiot when it comes to computers. I do know about nothing about codecs and the sort.  I can see my Mediasmart server just fine from my xbox, but can't figure out anything outside of that. So here's my questions. 

1.  If I have a digital copy of a blu-ray disc and I copy the files over to the server in /videos (point where I am going to store my ripped movies), should I not be able to stream them to the xbox? 

2.  Has anyone here had any success ripping blu-ray dvd's to their server and streaming them to their xbox?  I've tried pretty much anything you can think of and can't get it figured out.  DVDFab.  AnyDVD + Handbreak.  AnyDVD + Ripbot.  I don't mind paying for some software if I know it's going to work, but for the life of me, I can't get it to work! 

Thanks for the help as it's been a month now and I'm no where near where I need to be at on this.