9 replies to this topic

[I am Reid]

I have bought an internal blu-ray driver and my plan was to stream the movies from my PC to my xbox through windows media center. Now I know its possible to play blu-ray movies in Windows Media Center, but what I need to know is am I going to run into a problem streaming them to my xbox.

[Boz]

reidtheweed01, on Nov 29 2009, 00:18, said:

I have bought an internal blu-ray driver and my plan was to stream the movies from my PC to my xbox through windows media center. Now I know its possible to play blu-ray movies in Windows Media Center, but what I need to know is am I going to run into a problem streaming them to my xbox.

Unfortauntely, it's not possible to play Blu-ray movies through Windows media Center by default. You need to install some 3rd party plugins like Arcsoft in order to play through WMC and even then, it's actually running underlying code for that Arcsoft plugin to play Blu-ray movies. Even if you did install Arcsoft, you will not be able to stream Blu-ray movie directly to Xbox 360 due to missing codecs and Xbox 360 not supporting Linear PCM / uncompressed audio but basically AC3/DD sound. Xbox 360 can support DTS but only if it's played from an optical disc.

If you are talking about ripping movies from blu-ray and then playing them.. Yeah, you should be able to but you will severely need to downgrade the quality. So let's say your Blu-ray movie has 1080p24 at an average ~20-25mbps bitrate with DTS-MA or TrueHD or even LPCM audio. You will need to go through the whole process of downgrading audio to AC3 640kbps at best or convert the Blu-ray rips to WMV-HD or MP4 which will give you so so surround sound but nowhere near Blu-ray quality. Also, be careful as Xbox 360 knows to stutter with playback with movies encoded at bitrates above 10mbps (that's including audio and video combined).

[Sikh]

^ Wait, so converting a ripped blu-ray into divx wouldnt keep the quality? Because I know for a fact 360s play Divx format.

[Phantom Helix]

Sikh, on Dec 29 2009, 02:29, said:

^ Wait, so converting a ripped blu-ray into divx wouldnt keep the quality? Because I know for a fact 360s play Divx format.

anytime you convert video and audio you loose quality, best type of ripped blu-ray movies are .m2ts which are untouched from the disc, but playing them on other devices is not always going to work so you have to convert them to formats that they will play, more often then not you are loosing half the file size if not more and a lot of quality.

The .m2ts from the Transformers ROTF is something like 30gb+, converted to DIVX or h.264.mkv playable on 360 the file is only around 9gb, you really think no quality loss occurred?

and after that point you need to use a transcoder that is going to further degrade quality to stream it

Now if you want to stream directly off the blu-ray disc to the 360 the copy protection inherent in BR and the players is not going to allow it

Edited by Phantom Helix™, 29 December 2009 - 08:48.

[I am Reid]

Ok, so I basically just pulled the entire .m2ts file off the disc and was able to stream it to my xbox through media center. It works just fine, but obviously my network/xbox couldnt keep up. I would pause it to try and let it buffer, which worked, but the playback would catch back up with the buffer after a few minutes. So I tried to converted to mp4 which played fine, but I wasnt able to keep the surroundsound. So I am still looking for a way to keep the surroundsound. One thing I did notice, when I took the .m2ts file apart I noticed the audio streams were 3-4gb, and with I think 3(maybe 4?) that adds up for the file size. For example, the raw valkyrie file was 22.9gb, the english audio alone is 3.8gb, it has french, spanish, and commentary so that took up quite a bit. So I was wondering if their was a way I could keep the .m2ts file format, and simply just strip out the audio tracks I dont want. That way maybe the xbox could keep up with the file being 1/2 its original size. I would like to do this because my reciever showed it was getting surroundsound and not 7ch stero. Maybe its been done, idk, just an idea.

[Phantom Helix]

removing those audio tracks shouldn't make a difference but the raw .m2ts has a combined audio/video bitrate that is simply to high for your network, that is why it needs to be re-encoded to a format that will work,

when you made the mp4 what did you use to encode it?, personally i would make a .mkv and keep the english DTS audio track but reduce the video bitrate

[I am Reid]

I used ripbot364 to encode it, because I have never been able to get mkv files to play through media center.

[DaDude]

Phantom Helix™, on 29 December 2009 - 08:43, said:

anytime you convert video and audio you loose quality, best type of ripped blu-ray movies are .m2ts which are untouched from the disc, but playing them on other devices is not always going to work so you have to convert them to formats that they will play, more often then not you are loosing half the file size if not more and a lot of quality.

The .m2ts from the Transformers ROTF is something like 30gb+, converted to DIVX or h.264.mkv playable on 360 the file is only around 9gb, you really think no quality loss occurred?

It's common sense, yet so many ignorant people don't seem to get it. My friend has a nice 42" Sony LCD TV and PS3 and when it comes to buying movies, he always says to me "Why spend $20 on a movie when I can just download it?" I mean, really?

[RealFduch]

Phantom Helix, on 29 December 2009 - 08:43, said:

The .m2ts from the Transformers ROTF is something like 30gb+, converted to DIVX or h.264.mkv playable on 360 the file is only around 9gb, you really think no quality loss occurred?

Yeah... Like when I convert 30Mb .bmp file to 1Mb .png file. Or when I compress 30Gb of text files to 100Mb. Obviously 99% of data is lost forever.
/s

BTW. compression algorithm used for DVDs (don't know about Blu Rays) is rather inefficient space-wise, so you can recompress it into much smaller file without loosing much quality.

[giantpotato]

RealFduch, on 14 January 2011 - 16:13, said:

Yeah... Like when I convert 30Mb .bmp file to 1Mb .png file. Or when I compress 30Gb of text files to 100Mb. Obviously 99% of data is lost forever.
/s

BTW. compression algorithm used for DVDs (don't know about Blu Rays) is rather inefficient space-wise, so you can recompress it into much smaller file without loosing much quality.

No, It's like compressing a 30MB jpg into a 10MB jpg since both Blu-ray and blu-ray rips use the same, or similar lossy codecs. Blu-Ray will always be better quality than any file that was created from it.