PM received and responded to you Goodspeed. Im in the process of re-encoding every important title in my library to WMv as we speak.Long arduous process i admit, but once it is done, the MCE PC will become the digital hub for every movie i wanna watch. I only need an Extender for the living room, and possible my bro coming back from UK bring back his PAL 360 to connect to the MCE as another Extender. The MCE PC can support up to 5 Extenders i believe.
I done audio and song ripping into the MCe Pc, and it is running smoothly . Using your free iTunes with FEtchArt to fetch the album art. Pictures from my vacations , worktrips, and other important business/social events are also placed into the MCe PC ( i have a 180Gb hot-swappable HP Personal Media Drive for all this, already encoded close to 50 movies, tons of songs, and albums of pictures, and still have a lot more space to fill, i plan to buy the Media Drives separately as future storage investment, since they are hot-swappable like memory cards).
Feel free to ask here if you have any queries.
I have given up on the "streaming Divx to your Xbox 360" transcoding method, as you dont have control over image quality of the transcoded movies your are streaming. It will consume temporary storage space, so having them in Divx and transcoding them on the fly, is not a preferred solution for me. But i understand that a lot of us have our movies in Divx/Xvid for the excellent picture quality: filesize ratio.
So now all my movie are in WMV format, encoded using Windows Media Encoder at my own custom profile settings. The results retains the resolution in which the movies resides in DVDs( or previous file formats), and in case of the DVDs, shrinks them to between 30-40% of the original filesize. You will get better results if you compress them further at the expense of picture quality if you want, but the movies i have encoded are meant as quality video streams for watching in my home theatre environment, when entertaining guests and friends when they came over. They dont even realise that they are watching a re-encoded WMV instead of a standard MPEG2 stream from a DVD!
I researched WMV-HD that will be my next goal. But doing so requires purchasing of special encoding softwares( which includes licenses as well) and it comes only bundled with the appropriate hardwares to do so ( mostly professional video editor are using, and that is a bit overkill). I have downloaded samples from www.wmvhd.com, and streamed it from the MCE PC to the Xbox 360 and the results puts even the "Welcome to Xbox 360" movie we all have in our 360s HDDs to shame. If only i can get hold of the appropriate softwares and licenses..., bear in mind , encoding a stadard DVd resolution WMV alone has me clocking up to 5 hrs to do the full encoding, minus the VOB ripping, and audio demux/muxing, but generally you need about 6 hours for a standard full motion picture movie to encode. But the results are breathtaking, likei said before, no differences between DVD and encoded WMV, PLUS all my encoded WMVs are Dolby Digital 5.1 surround, meaning they are not demuxed to shitty stereo, they retain their AC3 characteristics.....what this means is that, when that lightsaber in Episode III moves from a wide arc from top to bottom and left to right, my encoded WMVs, captured that same aural experience just like watchihng a DVD on a home theatre.
Any questions? Fire away!
This post has been edited by stringfellow: Apr 3 2006, 07:05 PM 
Apr 3 2006, 03:07 PM, updated 20y ago
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