gwax's rumblings

About a week ago, I finally caved and bought myself an Xbox 360. Along with some really great games (ex. Gears of War) the 360 is also a pow­er­house of media play­ing capa­bil­i­ties. Using Microsoft pro­vided soft­ware you can set up your PC to serve media over the net­work to your 360. This means that you can lis­ten to your entire music col­lec­tion while you play you games (solves the only prob­lem with Geometry Wars, the mediocre sound­track); the 360 natively plays mp3s so you don’t need to do much of any­thing to make music work. Unfortunately, the 360 will only natively play wmv video files, and only ones that are prop­erly for­mat­ted, which means that you’ll have to do a bit of work to watch and DivX, Xvid or, for that mat­ter, just about any­thing else that you didn’t get from Microsoft to begin with. Playing my video files on my TV through my 360 is an impor­tant thing for me, so set about scour­ing the inter­net to fig­ure out how to do this and, hav­ing done so, I now report to you on what I have found.

If you’re run­ning Vista or XP MCE, it’s sup­pos­edly a lot eas­ier but, since I have nei­ther, you’re on your own and I can­not help. Supposedly, it’s pos­si­ble to use TVersity on a reg­u­lar XP machine to do real-time on-the-fly transcod­ing of your files into wmv but I was not able to make it work. It may be the case that my com­puter is not pow­er­ful enough for on-the-fly transcod­ing or it might be that I had it set up wrong but the sim­ple fact of the mat­ter is that, in my opin­ion, TVersity is pretty flaky and doesn’t pro­vide a very good net­work inter­face when you access it through the 360. Using Microsoft’s soft­ware and man­u­ally transcod­ing files before I watch them is thus my option of choice for watch­ing movies and lis­ten­ing to music on my 360. This brings us to the real meat of this post, how to best transcode files for play­ing on the 360.

I tried a whole bunch of transcod­ing options, none of which worked, before I came across Encode360. Encode360 encodes things per­fectly and allows for the vital rescal­ing (more on this later) but suf­fers from two prob­lems: it’s slow and it crashes a lot. A lit­tle more dig­ging turned up that some had fig­ured out how to use VLC media player to per­form the transcodes. I tried the VLC transcod­ing method and dis­cov­ered that it was both very fast and encoded per­fectly. Unfortunately, the batch files pro­vided for this pur­pose don’t do rescal­ing and have a num­ber of other prob­lems. The rescal­ing is vital because if you don’t scale your file prop­erly, the 360 will auto-scale to fit the TV and the 360’s auto-scaling is ter­ri­ble, leav­ing blocky arti­facts all over the screen. In order to deal with the 360’s scal­ing issues and some of the other prob­lems of the pro­vided batch files, I read through VLC’s doc­u­men­ta­tion and fid­dled around a bunch and am proud to say that I have come up with a few new batch files for VLC that will process video files and make them work prop­erly on your 360.

Go get your hands on a copy of VLC media player and then grab the batch files I have made (vlc2xbox480h.bat and vlc2xbox720w.bat). You will need to mod­ify the batch files slightly for your sys­tem; open the file in a text edi­tor and change the very begin­ning to point to where you have installed VLC (“C:\program files\vlc\vlc.exe” is where mine is, change this if you need to). In order to transcode a file, you will drag-and-drop the file that you want to transcode onto one of these batch files, depend­ing on the files aspect ratio. If the files aspect ratio is less than 16:9, drop it on the 480h file; if the aspect ratio is greater than 16:9, drop it on the 720w files; if the aspect ratio is 16:9, drop it on either one. It is impor­tant to note that your file’s file­name can­not have any sin­gle quotes (‘) or it will cause prob­lems. So there you have it, the best way that I’ve found to transcode files into a 360 ready for­mat. I might improve the batch files later or I might try writ­ing a wrap­per appli­ca­tion at some point and, if I do, I’ll post those updates here.