Video on the 360

[leowyatt]

I thought I'd put this thread together for us poor schmucks who don't have machines fast enough to transcode on the fly.

Since I discovered newsgroups around new year I've been plagued with problems getting videos to play in the 360. I'm consistently downloading mkv files which we know the 360 won't play natively so I have to keep encoding them into different formats so it will play them.

Initially I was using a program called WinAVI Video converter in conjunction with the ccp codec pack for mkv files. This worked well but I have just discovered a great app which is free and is a nice all in one solution. It's called the Videora Xbox 360 Converter. I've just thrown 2 MKV files at it and it's converted with no problems and takes on average around an 3 hours to convert a 720p MKV file into something I can watch on the 360. So a big :thumbsup: from me.

[Daz]

I just download xvid in the first place :D

[leowyatt]

But are all the HD releases available in divx?

[Daz]

Dunno, maybe, but I dont download the HD ones anyway :) I rip DVDs at about the same resolution I download which is...*looks*.... 624x352, upscaled by the 360 it looks great, saves me tons of disk space too.

You're probably wasting a lot of bandwidth/space anyway if you're downloading 720p, I thought your TV 1024x768?

[leowyatt]

yeah it is but I thought my TV's native res was 720p :confused:

I don't think we're wasting bandwidth on 720p content as we catching up on Bones we watch 2 eps. 1 was the normal 350Mb ep and the other was a 720p 1.2Gb episode and the different was astonishing.

[Feek]

Ooo, I'll give that a try, thanks. I deleted the single 10Gb mkv I had but will grab something smaller to see how it goes :)

[leowyatt]

A download link (http://www.download.com/Videora-Xbox-360-Converter/3000-2194-10779507.html?part=dl-VideoraXb&subj=uo&tag=button) might help :o

[Daz]

yeah it is but I thought my TV's native res was 720p :confused:
No mate, 720p is 1280x720 - a widescreen (16:9) resolution :)

I don't think we're wasting bandwidth on 720p content as we catching up on Bones we watch 2 eps. 1 was the normal 350Mb ep and the other was a 720p 1.2Gb episode and the different was astonishing.
It's bound to be better for sure, but you're downloading pixels you aren't ever going to see, and the total size is 4 times larger.

Xvid at a high bitrate (I use 1200) is a good compromise for me. Was watching Lost last night and it was bright, crisp, clear.. great really. A series of 24 costs me ~8GB of disk space, the extra picture quality isn't worth losing another ~20GB of space, or hours of downloading. Not for me anyway :)

[Feek]

Which way are you converting, Leo?

I'm going into the Current Conversion screen, selecting my video, selecting Xbox360 as the Device and then changing the Profile to H.264 720p 3072kbps Stereo/160kbps to convert an 8Gb .mkv file.

I then click on start and it's reckoning about 6 hours, although the time remaining is dropping and raising all over the place, I guess that's as it's going through frames with either a lot or a little data on them. That's with the Priority set high.

[leowyatt]

that is it mate. I set the 360 as my one click settings

[Haly]

I'll have to give that a try the next time I have an mkv :) A pesky one always seems to turn up when I can't find any other source.

[leowyatt]

Well I'm about to convert another mkv download. Everything has been great so far. I converted DH4 yesterday and that was perfect :)

[Feek]

Yup, my conversion worked well - I just left it running overnight with the checkbox for shutting down the pc ticked, I renamed the .mp4 to an .avi to ensure that the 360 would read it (didn't even check with it as an .mp4). The resultant file was about half the size of the original: 8Gb source, 4Gb avi.

[leowyatt]

Well I tried to watch a video last night and it seems the file isn't visible through the media blade :(

A little digging and all is not well. It appears the 360 won't play mpeg2 files from the dashboard it will only play them through the extender!

If you don't have MCE then don't use this software. Seems the 4 files I've converted won't play on the 360 so I'll just have to play them on the iBook.

[Desmo]

To be honest, I just find it easier plugging the laptop straight into the TV and skipping the 360 altogether.

[Davey_Pitch]

Well I tried to watch a video last night and it seems the file isn't visible through the media blade :(

A little digging and all is not well. It appears the 360 won't play mpeg2 files from the dashboard it will only play them through the extender!

If you don't have MCE then don't use this software. Seems the 4 files I've converted won't play on the 360 so I'll just have to play them on the iBook.
Hav you tried using TVersity to stream it?

[leowyatt]

We only have an old AMD Athalon system which isn't very fast so streaming isn't really an option. I'll just plug the iBook in :) it's quieter than the 360 anyway :p

[Wossi]

This is why I built a little htpc, plays anyone I throw at it now and means I can download the 720p files and watch them BIG :D

[Feek]

Well I tried to watch a video last night and it seems the file isn't visible through the media blade :(

A little digging and all is not well. It appears the 360 won't play mpeg2 files from the dashboard it will only play them through the extender!

If you don't have MCE then don't use this software. Seems the 4 files I've converted won't play on the 360 so I'll just have to play them on the iBook.

I'm not using MCE at all - All I do is go to the media blade and select videos and the files I've set to share from the library in WMP appear and play perfectly :confused:

[leowyatt]

So all I need is WMP11?

[Daz]

Aye. It wont do any transcoding but if the 360 supports the file type then you can stream it from that/.

[leowyatt]

I thought the 360 supported mpeg2? :confused:

[Daz]

http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archive/2007/11/30/december-2007-video-playback-faq.aspx

Cant find it on there :|

[leowyatt]

Hmm I remember seeing a table earlier that showed the only way mpeg2 was supported was using the media centre extender :( stupid MS!

[Daz]

Could be. MC uses MPG2 and the extender is fairly thin.

[leowyatt]

sorted the mpeg2 issue, just get the app to convert to h264 instead as the 360 plays mp4 files :D just takes a little longer than mpeg2 :(