I was just wondering what you guys use? I think Videora 360 only supports "to Mpeg-2" converting. If the 360 can now play WMV files from a USB pen / DVD, surely its a better format to use.

Ive heard of Blaze Media Pro, and Agogo convereter; but i wasnt impressed with either .

Any other ideas?

Hi,

River Past Video Cleaner Pro does it but I find it quite slow! (took about 35mins to do a 25min video!)
Videora was quick (about 10 minutes) but only does MPEG-2 which the 360 cant even read off my usb stick.

Can't find any others!

Kev.

Tried Movie Maker on a 40 minute clip.. not too shabby, except for the stretched 640x480. Doesn't look good on a widescreen TV

Yeah i tried River, i think it has some stability issues under Vista , especially with bigger files, movies, etc. Although i did manage to convert an episode of family guy! But like you said, its fricking slow lol.

Oh and i tried a multitude of video types on my 360 already, only WMV can be played (i tried tricking it by renaming the extensions, to see if it had the codecs, otherwise it wouldnt even show .mpeg / .avi / .mp4 files).

Yeah Hard flip, movie maker might be an option

Someone's gotta come up with a peice of software pronto!

Ahhh found it,




Windows Media Encoder 9.0 Series

It encoded the same family guy episode in about 15 minutes (much faster than river). Plus its by M$ themselves . Easy to use aswell, worked with my DivX standard codec, and it does it all in a nifty wizard at the startup . Smiles all round...

Videora is still much faster though, as it obviously uses a format (mpeg) that is quicker to encode.

I tried that and it just hangs when I choose the .avi file. Any ideas? I uninstalled ffdshow, directvobsub and DivX and no luck still.

WinAVI Video Converter works, but it seems to be really slow. It took 3 hours to encode an episode of lost (xvid 960x544 res) I had on my pc. It does look really good though. the only thing is that I don't get dolby digital 5.1 audio from the wmv file.

windows media encoder doesn't work for me when encoding from xvid

Oh , are you guys running XP? Im running it with Vista RC1 and the standard DivX codecs (although it should run fine in XP).

Note: I can now clarify that although the quality produced by windows media encoder is good, it is still damn slow . I have a bad feeling that encoding ANYTHING to WMV is going to be a tedious, CPU eating process .

Oh and im not sure if you can encode WMV files with 5.1 sound (but i guess you must be able to for those IMAX films).

Mine hangs too when using WME9 and trying to select a .avi file.

Hmm well it was working fine for me until a moment ago Bad voodoo, i guess thats why its one of Microsoft's only free peices of software .

I got WinAVI Video Converter instead (as suggested by felang), and i must say although slightly slower, it does a damn better job than WME9.

Its very simple, yet not lacking in options.

I advise registering as otherwise it plants a huge bit of annoying text right in the middle of your encodes, the product only costs 30 bucks and is well worth it.

I use quicktime pro, and my mac pro

quad 3ghz
2 gig ram
ati x1900xt

Using quicktime pro i can convert a 2 hour movie from any format to wmv in about 10 minutes.


what are your guys times???

I use quicktime pro, and my mac pro

quad 3ghz
2 gig ram
ati x1900xt

Using quicktime pro i can convert a 2 hour movie from any format to wmv in about 10 minutes.


what are your guys times???

looks like MS threw a wrench in our plans of joy once again.
I hope someone develops some kind of streaming app that can stream any video over to 360 via realtime wmv conversion somehow.

That or the less likely, MS adding support for other formats.

yea i'm struggling to find a decent one

most programs crash on my pc, it's so crap!

is it just the WMV format is CRAP or am i doing something wrong?

Finally got WinAvi working, and converts fine. But they looks HORRIBLE on my 360? so pixelated, even at highest quality. Is this just because wmv is crap?

It maybe to with that, in WinAVI, with profile did you select (WMV9 and DVD quality video)?

hmmm don't have those options. I am using an older version though, as the latest version crashes every time

I'll go through the options again.

Yeah let me know.

how did u save to a wmv with quicktime pro

it is an option.
I have quictime PRO, 7.1
I also have something called flip4mac, wich lets quicktime play windows files. this might be why i can do it. i never tried it before i had flip4mac. but if you get that, its free, i think you can do it 2. I has always been under my export options.

Export>movie to windows media

then pick your settings

does anyone kno if theres a program that does that but for quicktime in windows

So you need a plug in to do it in windows? Like jb502 said flip4mac might sort it out. I wonder why the encode times are considerably faster than bog standard windows encoders?

I don't know what it is, but it looks like lower resolution WMVs are pixelated on the Xbox 360. On XBMC, they are very clean and don't really have any problems.

I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but I use Transcode360 to stream Divx, AVI, MPEG, etc. to my Xbox360.

The only problem is that you need MCE.

This one can encode 5.1 wmv, but it's a shareware

I think it's more about MPEG2 -> MPEG4 -> WMV being crap..

-dp

Because he has a quad processor system doing a multithreaded task.

That is correct. And in case your wondering, it is awesome!!

I just tried WinAVI on some 350meg divx things I had sitting there. The wmv's that came out of batch processing overnight look the same but they are all 850-950 megs in size.

Any way to shrink them a tad? I used WMV9 DVD Quality and have the quality set to 90

Thats odd, Im sure I encoded DivX to DVD quality WMV, and got basically the same file size as the original (in some cases smaller, some larger). I used video cleaner pro, works a charm in Vista.

Also even though jb502 used a quad processer, I have an AMD 64bit 3400, which is nothing to be scoffed at. I mean "2 hour movie from any format to wmv in about 10 minutes", thats phenominal .

right, but surely you were not using the highest quality settings. because if you were your filesize would be larger. And there is no way in hell your 3400 can do it as fast as quad xeons. yes i know amd is nice. that is what i switched from, and i had a 3800 X2. you must be using low quality settings. am i right. i was using the highest quality possible.

@MattyT
I don't do a ton of transcoding, but 2 hours in 10 minutes seems a bit fast with no quality loss? I used to do Mpeg-2 to divx and divx/xvid to Mpeg-2 and it took quite a long time.

Even on a Quad Core 6700 it takes 63 seconds to convert a 3 minute HD clip. On an FX-62 that same clip took 127 seconds.

Yeah exactly, maybe Mac OS is making a better WMV encoder?

Oh and jb502, of course, like you said, four processers are better than one, but a 2 hour film in 10 minutes?! i was using video cleaner pro, encoding a DivX file into a windows media 9 WMV, 48Khz Stereo, original framerate, original size / resolution:-

Original DivX Avi: 175Mb

Output WMV file: 93.2Mb

Side by side, the quality looks exactly the same. I noticed that the WMV file takes more time to seek (in VLC at least), and also takes a couple of seconds before it pauses (but it is half the god damn size so ill shut the hell up!). Other than that, my most succesful encode yet!

ok, you guys are right, i made a HUGE mistake. I am using flip4mac (a plugin for quicktime) which allows me to encode to wmv. I only had the trial version, wich will only encode the first 30 seconds of a video. Last night i realized this and bought the full version. And encoding to wmv takes a very long time. I'll be completely honest. I'm kinda mad it takes so long. I started a movie last night at about 11 p.m. it it now 7 a.m., and its not done yet. It is at 74 percent.

BUT, i am using very high quality settings,plus i am changing the resolution to make it bigger. So once this one gets done, i will try to do a movie with just average setting. then i will give my time on that.

What are your times, how long does a 2 hour movie take, and what kind of settings are you using. Are you doing a two pass encode, or one pass. are you keeping the resolution the same. Mose downloaded videos if widescreen are around 596X246. Are you keeping this, or are you making it bigger.

All these things make a HUGE differnce. So give some more info. Because to tell you the truth, i just got this mac pro about 1 month ago. And i need to know how fast it is compared to a pc.

There is also one other problem i can think off. I am encoding in a windows codec (wmv) on a mac. So i am kinda thinking it is not gonna be that fast. Just like if you on your pc, tried to encode to a quicktime movie format. It would probably take longer for you. I can encode to h.264, which is apples quicktime codec (the best one) very fast, much faster than wmv. Of course if xbox 360 would read more video formats, i wouldn't have to be going through all this trouble. let me know if you can. thanks.

1gig ram, AMD 3400 64bit, to encode a 2 hour movie took me like 3-4 hours (double pass).

did you change the frame size at all. or did you encode at the size it was. And what was that size.
was it like 600x300 or what?

For divx + 5.1 ac3 converting, this one would be great. It supports WMV9/VC-1.

wme assistant, but it's a shareware.

together with this video converter or iPod video converter to convert videos...would be better

can anyone get me some info on how to flash an xbox 360 elite please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!