DVD rips for Xbox 360
Anyone have any experience with which format/settings to use when ripping DVD's to stream to a Xbox 360? Ideally, it would: - Keep in 5.1 surround sound - Decent quality (going to be displayed around 70" on a 720p projector) - Be playable on Windows computer (computer illiterate buddies accessing the server) Filesize is not a big concern (we can always add more HDD's :twisted: ). Also, all of our xbox's are updated to play xvid/divx formats as well. Thanks, RD

http://handbrake.fr/ Use the XviD/DivX codec. You can limit file sizes to ~1GB for a movie and get good performance. I use ~700MB files on my 360 (using VGA) on a 1024x768 projector and it looks great. Just watching it you can't tell it's compressed at all, side by side with a DVD you'll notice, but it's still marginal. I'm unsure about the 5.1, but I'm sure there's an option to do it. Of course bittorrents happen to use similar settings :) Just use the auto settings in handbrake on a movie and see how it turns out. It'll end up being 600-1300MB and be good quallity/resolution/framerate. You're friends will end up having to get the XviD/DivX codec (or use VLC). It's a slight inconvenience but I couldn't imagine using some kind of Windows codec for this. Of course once they get the DivX codec they can use CVS camcorders, too :D

Have you tried TVersity for streaming. It's a media server that streams and should be playable with any format as long as you have codecs installed. I did have some problems with "real media" file's, and also large(HD mkv's) files. Pretty much all my avi's, mp4's, and even flv's have worked. Only catch is it requires windows to run. Just do a google search for "tversity" and in their faq's is an xbox guide, as well as ps3. I haven't tried xbox, but I use it for my cousin's PS3.

Thanks bobbarker and bando! I started looking at handbrake, and it looks very promising, especially the CLI version :)

I have to say, the xbox360 is great as the "Media Center Extender." I use it with my XP MCE box and it's absolutely awesome. Have an over-the-air HD antenna and I can get some nice football games/whatever is in season on the projector :D

I haven't had any luck with any handbrake setups. All of the xvids I try to make turn out really choppy.. This is what I tried last: -i "E:\Movies\Zoolander" -o "E:\Movies\Zoolander.avi" -e xvid -E faac -w 720 -l 480 -b 2000 -2 -B 160 -R 48 -D 1 -6 6ch -v I was thinking along the lines of mencoder or ffmpeg, but had not luck either. bobbarker, do you mind sharing the command line options you use for handbrake? Thanks!

I use the GUI...it should be available for everything but might not be script friendly....I'll try and figure out what works for me. Oh goody, the GUI can tell you it's CLI options: -i "D:\VIDEO_TS" -t 1 -c 1-29 -o "C:\DogDayAfternoon.avi" -e xvid -E lame -p -m -S 700 -2 -B 160 -R 48 -v That should break down in to: -source from the DVD drive -title "1" -chapters "1-29" -output to C:\ -xvid encoder -mp3 audio (lame) -the "-p" enables anamorphic encoding (this DVD is 1.78 ) (480*1.78=854 ... VLC reports the res at 853x480, so it's pretty close) -the "-m" is for setting chapter markers, the wiki says it's for mp4 file type only...hrm -next is setting to do bitrates to get 700MB file size -next I'm guessing is two pass encoding -160kbps audio bitrate -48khz sample rate...? -be verbose This should work on the 360. I am copying from a DVD but this is ....ahrm... an already decrypted one :) Handbrake doesn't have any decrypting feature of it's own so you'll have to rip a DVD to your HDD first with something like DVD decrypter (unsure of linux equivalent, decss? something like that?).