Preferred File Type


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At the moment my xbox 360s just has an internet connection for live, there is no media centre server (it is at my girlfriends house my PC is at mine) so to watch media through it I put it onto my 500GB portable hard drive which is formatted with HFS+. I have found some files work and some don't, which is unsurprising since there is a range of file types used, from MKV, avi, mp4 etc most are SD but some are HD (720).

I am going to be moving in with her next month, so will be bringing my computer which has win7 and media centre and cabling it up. So I will be streaming through that.

I would like to format my library so it is a constant file type that I know will work and will provide a smooth watch-able video both from USB hard drive and other Ethernet. I am thinking MP4 would be the best? I know it can only handle stereo sound, but since I only have the TVs built in speakers that is fine.

Conversion time isn't an issue, my work computer has 2 Xeon X5650 cpus and 12GB of DDR3.

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Supported Video Codecs:

- DivX 5.0.5 (DX50)
- MPEG-1
- WMV3 (HD)
- XviD 1.0.0
- XviD 1.0.2
- XviD 1.0.3
- XviD 1.1.0 Beta 1
- XviD ISO MPEG-4

Un-Supported Video Codecs:

- DivX 3.0 (DivX 3 Low-Motion)

Supported Audio Codecs:

- 0?0055(MP3) ID?d as MPEG-1 Layer 3 117 kb/s (58/ch, stereo) VBR LAME3.97 48000 Hz
- 0?0055(MP3) ID?d as MPEG-1 Layer 3 128 kb/s (64/ch, stereo) CBR
48000 Hz
- 0?0055(MP3) ID?d as MPEG-1 Layer 3 96 kb/s (48/ch, stereo) CBR
48000 Hz
- 0?0055(MP3) ID?d as MPEG-1 Layer 3 117 kb/s (58/ch, stereo) VBR LAME3.97 48000 Hz
- 0?0055(MP3) ID?d as MPEG-1 Layer 3 96 kb/s (48/ch, stereo) CBR
48000 Hz

Un-Supported Audio Codecs:

- 48000Hz 385 kb/s tot (6 chnls) (5.1 Audio ? AC3)???
- MPEG-1 Layer 3 48000Hz 156 kb/s tot , Joint Stereo (mp3) 

Not sure how up to date that is.

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I use TVesrity on my PC to stream to the XBOX and i'm yet to get an incompatible file.

I was going to suggest that too. Rather than using Media Center and converting your library, use an aftermarket solution like TVersity that will transcode on the fly.

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I thought I'd give TVersity a try and I can't seem to get it to recognise any of my 720p files, either MP4, MOV, or MKV.

I've tried transcoding when necessary or all the time and neither seem to work. Any clues?

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did you set up media center in win 7 and the xbox?

i didn't do that myself but otherwise just installing and running it under win7 it didn't work for me either. files showed up on the xbox but did not play.

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If you use it with Win7 media center, you can play MKVs (H.264 + AC3) without transcoding once you install Divx media foundation and ac3filter. This in addition to native xvid, divx, h264 and wmv support.

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Must admit upgrading to 7 has been very tempting (I just haven't got the time with lots of work atm). This might be the one to push me over the edge and try it this weekend, unless anyone has an answer to my problem that lets me remain on my current setup?

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For some reason my xbox only plays half of my mp4 movies. Don't really know what's going on there.

MP4 is not a codec. It's a container. Use MediaInfo to find out what codecs are in those files.

According to Wikipedia, the XBOX 360 supports h.264 video, so I would use that codec in an MP4 container.

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Must admit upgrading to 7 has been very tempting (I just haven't got the time with lots of work atm). This might be the one to push me over the edge and try it this weekend, unless anyone has an answer to my problem that lets me remain on my current setup?

i'm not sure if vista update wmp to version 12 but if not it should allow greater connectivity and streaming to your xbox without doing much if any work. otherwise i don't generally recomend upgrading from vista to 7.

MP4 is not a codec. It's a container. Use MediaInfo to find out what codecs are in those files.

According to Wikipedia, the XBOX 360 supports h.264 video, so I would use that codec in an MP4 container.

i tried resaving a h264 file from .mkv to .avi in mkvmergegui but it didn't work. maybe i did something wrong. it didn't play in wmp12 either.

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well i got some of my media library running through tversity after running the media center set up on both win7 and my xbox, but could get anime with with soft subs runs running even if they were in h264 .mkv's

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MP4 is not a codec. It's a container. Use MediaInfo to find out what codecs are in those files.

According to Wikipedia, the XBOX 360 supports h.264 video, so I would use that codec in an MP4 container.

I think Xbox only plays stereo AAC. If you have 6 channel AAC mp4, it won't play. (in addition to whatever H.264 profile it supports on the video side)

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Use RipBot264 or Handbrake to encode MKVs or other formats to a high-quality MP4 of a file size to your choosing. Note the larger the file size, the harder it's going to be to stream.

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I myself use an AVI container, XVID(720p) video codec with AC3 audio which plays great through the Xbox 360 Dashboard, PS3 or even directly from my Samsung TV(ethernet or through usb)

Using Media Connect an xbox 360 will not stream an mp4 file, it would need to be played from a usb drive.

Using Windows Media Center though this wouldn't matter, that is basically a modified remote desktop connection to your PC from the Xbox so it'll play whatever the PC supports.

I've tried a lot of the one-click options to convert MKV to AVI but I found those to be lacking in quality.

So I do it the following multi-step way

1: I use MeGUI to extract the video and audio from MKV container(converting the audio to AC3 at the same time),

2: Use avc2avi to mux the video stream into an avi container

3: I use VirtualDubMod with the XVID codec to convert the video stream to XVID.

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Container (File Ext): .m2ts

Video: h.264

Audio: AC3 (5.1)

Movie sizes for 1080p: 7GB to 28GB

Movie sizes for 720p: 4.2GB to 7GB

Plays exceptionally well through Xbox 360 in MCE mode and any of our Windows 7 or Ubuntu PC's. If I downgrade some of the 720p files to less than 2GB, they also play well on my iPhone 3GS.

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Container (File Ext): .m2ts

Video: h.264

Audio: AC3 (5.1)

Movie sizes for 1080p: 7GB to 28GB

Movie sizes for 720p: 4.2GB to 7GB

Plays exceptionally well through Xbox 360 in MCE mode and any of our Windows 7 or Ubuntu PC's. If I downgrade some of the 720p files to less than 2GB, they also play well on my iPhone 3GS.

This is what I used to do. Rip DVDs (DVDFab) and convert to MKV with H264/ac3 (Handbrake). Then use tsMuxer to convert MKVs to M2TS and play it through MCE.

After the Divx media foundation stuff was finalized, I can now play MKVs in MCE and have no need for MKV>M2TS conversion. :)

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meh i can't seem to get anything to work for this gundam 00 movie file. tried pretty much everything in this thread as far as tried to mux or convert the fansub to play in any of these transcoders(which work for everything else) or MCE(which can't even find the file in windows according to the error and takes forever to find the video library in xbox)

just tried with a evangelion fansub and it won't work. only difference between these files and the ones that do work in tversity on the xbox is soft subs. they play in wmp12 after adding a codec pack just fine but fail to play in MCE.

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anyone still wondering about this try windows7 codec pack. it got all my file types working in both MCE and tversity. i had to uninstall https://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?act=announce&f=12&id=11 codec pack first though.

if anyone wants help getting subs working after doing the above, you need to find mkvextractgui and rip out the .ass file, rename the output file to the same name as the video file with the extension .srt in the same folder.

ie

movieabc.mkv

movieabc.srt

as well tversity will need to be set to always transcode the folder the video with subs is in.

i also sett all ffdshow programs to allow subtitles, don't know if that had any effect but if hte above does not work try doing this step in all ffdshow apps.

hope this helps. :)

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