360 as an extender & Nero Digital

[Ivor_Biggun]

thought I'd put this up here as it's taken me about a week of various searches and trial and error to get this about right for my needs hopefully this post will save other going through the process again.

For the past few years I've had a Media Centre set up and have happily been using a combination of DVD Shrink and Nero to save all my DVD's as Nero Digital mp4's the quality was decent enough for my needs and it didn't take up vast swathes of HDD space.

I recently purchased an XBOX360 and wanted to use it as an extender got it set up and found that i couldn't play any of my films through Media Centre on the xbox then i noticed there was an update (via xbox live) to allow the 360 to play DivX files and installed that it only works with the Nero Digital files that have been saved as "standard AVC" and only through the dashboard not through Media Centre, i still wasn't satisfied.

So i chose to re-encode all my films to wmv however none of the programs i could find would want to work with the Nero Digital format here's how i got around it.

Firstly i downloaded the k-lite codec pack (full) and installed k-lite using the default setup with a few tweaks, under directshow filter i chose the ffdshow codec for both DivX & Xvid, then under VFW video codecs i unchecked Xvid & DivX, everything else in the install was left as standard.

Next i downloaded Windows Media Encoder freely available from MS and installed that.

the controls for encoder are fairly easy to understand under the compression tab i clicked edit and applied the following settings to get reasonable video and retain the 5.1 audio from my mp4 files...

Under the general tab i set the following :
Audio - CBR - Windows Media 10 Professional
Video - CBR - Windows Media 9 Advanced Profile

Under the second tab "XXXXkbps" i set the following:
Audio Format : 192kbps, 48khz, 5.1channel 24bit CBR
Video size : checked the "same as video input"
set your frame rate to your region ie PAL - 25fps
then under video bit rate, I've set this to 2000kbps which is good enough for me but really it's a matter of preference and a compromise on disk space vs quality

You can tinker with these settings yourself but the above works flawlessly within XBOX MCE

I hope i have saved someone else a bit of time.

The only real downside is i haven't found a way to do a large batch of files and then have it turn the PC off so if anyone knows how i can do this it'd be appreciated. I can add numerous sources but as far as i can tell it'll just create one really long video file !

Now back to encoding

[simbot82]

thats a mission, well done and thanks for sharing

[Ivor_Biggun]

Cheers pal sorry for the War & Peace-esque post but as I said i hope it saves others some time still would like to find out how to do a batch so i could just leave it running overnight or while i am at work.

[CrashMonke]

Interesting. I am endcoding using the latest Nero Recode, settings as follows:

Profile Category: Nero Digital
Profile: Nero Digital AVC
Encoding Method: High quality (2-pass)

Everything else is default, and I use the 5.1 audio track.

I can see all the movies and play them through the MCE on my Xbox 360. The only problem I have in playback, and only on the 360, is that the audio and video are just slightly out of sync.

The 360 doesn't support H.264 (nero digital) and 5.1 sound, but the Nero Media Center extender transcodes it to stereo on the fly so it will play.

I'm in the US, but that shouldn't matter. Not sure why you have to jump through so many hoops in re-encoding.

Now if I could just figure out why the a/v sync is off...

[ExtremePC]

Ivor,

Its really pretty easy to automate, all you have to do is write a C# application that converts using the same settings you've used manually and takes command line parameters for file in and file out , then call that executable from a batch file that works on all files in a directory.

You can use GraphEditPlus to build the C# code, and use Visual C# Express (free download from MS) to build the executable. You only need to change a few lines from the code GraphEditPlus produces to be able to handle any file as opposed to the file used to build the graph in the first place.

It sounds a lot more complicated than it is!!! I did a very similar thing for .mkv files and the PS3, it took only a few hours of googling and downloading before I had an app that converts mkv's to mp4's WITH 5.1 audio and the PS3 plays them fine natively with no previous expirience with C#.

[KCROWE]

Hi - i've got a similar problem in that i want to convert all my DVDs over to WMV and store them on my VMC HDD and play them on an Xbox360 extender upstairs. Can i just confirm that you use Windows Windows Media Encoder to convert the VOB to WMV? This might be a realy easy way out of the problem for me if i can understand how to import the vob and recode it per your description. I burn my DVDs onto my HDD using DVD shrink (reauthroing them to get rid of the crap extra features etc) and then was looking for an easy way to convert them to a high quality WMV which would play on everything

BTW - I found out i can play the VOB directly on the 360 (surprisingly), but like all these formats, the FFWD function won't work well unless it is in WMV format. AVI, MPG etc won't FFWD at 4x so it is a pain moving about the movie. I hope WMV is the answer.

Thanks a Heap!

[KCROWE]

Originally Posted by Ivor_Biggun

.................Next i downloaded Windows Media Encoder freely available from MS and installed that.
Now back to encoding

Ivor - Just me again, i tried to do as you mentioned and the encoder crashes with a memory access error every time i try to point it at a .VOB, .AVI, or .MPG

ah well.... MS strikes again. No explanation, just unpredictable crashes with no fixes.

Could it be that i haven't downloaded the codec pack you mentioned?