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

And oh, if you're planning to stream wirelessly, i recently found out that Wireless "G" barely cut it. At my settings , there will be occasional audio breakups that the "G" bandwidth cannot accomodate, resulting in very slight pauses. I have recently won an auction in eBay on a dual "A+ G" router from DLink, DI-784, that will solve this streaming hiccups, since my MCE will streaming on the "A" bandwidth on the 5GHz band, while the rest of the internet/Xbox Live traffic will be routed via the "G" bandwidth on the 2.4Ghz band. Reason why these hiccups are evident is because the "G" band which operates in the 2.4Ghz band, are susceptible to interference from other electrical equipments like your cell phones, wireless cordless phone, even your microwave ovens. The "A" band is free from all these interferences.

All this info does not apply if you plan to draw Ethernet cables across your living quarters for a wired solution. I would rather like to keep my living area rather clutter free.

This post has been edited by stringfellow: Apr 3 2006, 06:57 PM

BTW, i think both Calvinz and Metalgrindsolid have set up MCE/360 combos of their own, jusdging from their Friends List status. You may want to get a second opinion from them.

Windows Media Encoder 9 Series

The current softwares im using to rip, demux/mux and encodes the audio and video from a DVD/foreign source are:-

For video, i use DVD Decrypter (with DeCSS + DVD Region X to enable reading other region DVDs), DVD2AVI and VFAPI. These softwares will rip, and encapsulates the ripped VOBs into an Avi container readable later by Windows MEdia Encoder.

For audio, after the VOBs are ripped, i use BeSweet v.0.6 to extract the AC3 files and separate them into 6 discrete channels ( FL, FR, FC, SL, SR, and LFE). You MUST use this particular version of BeSweet, otherwise you will not have the 6-channel profile used to separate the audio. Once the program does its work, i then author it back into Windows MEdia Encoder to encode a perfect WMV with 5.1.

Of course , if your video format has already been encoded into stereo, no amount of extraction will produce a 6-channel separate audio from BeSweet. This only applies to video files with surround capabilities embedded. This case is most evidently exemplified by the "ahem" videos downloaded from P2P source where they are already in stereo.

General rule of thumb, AVOID multiple re-encoding to reduce image quality loss. If you encode across the board from DVD to AVI to Divx-and then WMV, your video feed wont be as pure as the original feed.

PM me if you need a more thorough breakdown on how to go about this further.

This post has been edited by stringfellow: Apr 5 2006, 02:56 AM

Im not ENCODING or Burning a DVD, im encoding a WMV from a DVD and storing it into the hard drive. Otherwise it is easier to burn a DVd and play it by swapping it into the DVd drive. I want to avoid that by making the MCE as storage cache for all my movies.Button pushes from your couch or bed to change to a different movie, rather than having to get up and physically change the DVDs.

MyTV does zilch on mine.

Sounds interesting. No longer had to encode to WMV already, and this comes with subtitles too! Try this later tonight!

All i need to do now is to rip the ISOs off the DVDs and use this to stream it to the 360, compared to ripping the ISO, encoding to AVI, encapsulate into AVI container, rip the Ac3 into 6 channel WAVs, demuxing, and then re-encode into WMV with 5.1 format. Makes my life easier!

Im fairly sure the video would be no problem, how about the audio? If its streaming stereo only, im sticking with my longwinded method.

EDIT: Disregard that last paragraph. Supports 6 discrete channels!!! But FWD and RWD features are disabled when listening to AC3 soundtracks.

This post has been edited by stringfellow: May 17 2006, 11:10 AM

Tried already, keeps giving me runtime errors. Im witholding from using this until they have a stable version.

Holy Shit Holy Shit Holy Shit Holy Shit!

Those with MCE paired with your 360 will FLIP!!!!!

I SALUTE you Microsoft!

Apply that new 360 update via LIVE now! Remember the VGA only upscaling for your DVDs? NOT ANYMORE!

Those with movies inside your MCE PCs will have ALL your movies UPSCALED TO the resolution you set on 360! That means, ALL my movies , stored in the MCE , ripped at 480p, now shows up at 1080i/720p! Pure EYE CANDY!

Thank you SO MUCH MS! I <3 U!!!!!!!

My Matrix movies in 720p/1080i! All Pixar movie awesomeness in 720p/1080i! Bloody Star Wars Episode I till VI, in 720p/1080i!! I died and gone to HEAVEN!

The next step here is to find higher quality video sources (such as from HD-DVDs and Blueray discs, or WMVHD movies) at 720p and higher quality, and rip them one-to-one at original resolution.

This may be Microsoft's preparation for the upcoming HD-DVD addon not to far in the future.

Never used Dscaler before so i cant comment. It is as good as upscaling hardware DVD players though, so it's all good in my books.

Does the pirated versions of the MCE/Vista comes with the network performace tuner? This little app works wonders in determining if bandwidth is the culprit. If it is not, then it could either be your processing power (transcode eats into HDD space, hence reducing virtual memory) or you have not configures your router correctly.

Weird thing is, all routers wired or wireless , should work right out of the box. MCE is such an easy thing to configure, it does it for you when you start pairing it with a MEdia Extender. I got my second XB360 paired in like less than 3 minutes.

Hmmmmm......

Sounds complicated. I suggest a thorough install-over, a.k.a format and reinstall your OS to MCE. Maybe Marauderz can shed some light into these errors.

From what little knowledge i understand, those errors looks like some installation files are missing.

Maybe we could get bro Judge in here, since he did his installation without any problems. Judge, did you install OVER your WinXP, or a reformat and clean install?

Yup, just as i suspected. Need to do clean install, Dreamyghost. Hold off the upgrade suggestion we talked about, a clean install might work without having to upgrade. I think the registry has gotten so messed up, when you did install over MCE.

Vista has MCE built in. The final version, but im not sure about BEtas.

Maybe coz it's Beta. To tell you the truth, MCe setup on 360 (not Vista) is as simple as plug and play. You initial the setup from your 360, and then obtain the setup key. A prompt will pop out from your system tray indicating that an XB360 is attempting to connect/pairing, click that speech bubble and it will bring up the setup screen on the MCE. Type in the setup key, and the rest is done by onscreen prompts. Everything done!

You dont need to fiddle with port setting, forwardings and such, since MCE does that for you. Cant comment on Vista since i have yet to try it on any of my rigs.

Nope. you need to sign out of MCE, then you can go Live. you still get your friends notification though.

Answer:-

1. Media Center is a GUI installed over a normal WinXP, that way, you can control the aspects of media playing capabilities of a WinXP via the remote and user interfacing buttons/shortcuts. So, since a normal WinXP can play DivX, so does your MCE.

2. You can stream it to a Media Extender, provided your Media Extender supports and recognizes it. Some standalone ones like Phillips Streamiums are able to o so. In the case of XB360 as an Extender, technically you cant. But by clever way of transcoding an existing file format not supported by MCE, into a file format supported, and streaming this transcoded file across to your Extender, you can do so now.

Im picky with the quality of my movis, so i chose the longer route, i chose to encode them first before steraming them over. Transcoding , when performed, is left at the mercy of the preset transcoding quality of the program itself. I want to control this aspect first before streaming.

I agree. Beta 4 provides that option. I just want more control over the quality process. And i still couldnt get Beta 4 to run smoothly on my setup, runtime errors abound.

As for running DVD VOBs and transcoding that on the fly, again, runtime error. That option would be acceptable to me since ripping out VOB files from DVDs is taking the purest form of video format without any encoding process applied. Because logically, encoding over from original purest format to another format, and then trancoding it again using Transcode360 is apply further degradation of image quality, since you're encoding once too many time. The most idea situation is to have the original video format run straight away, the next best is to only encode once, with programs that allows the most minimum image quality loss.

Best = play DVDs straight away on XB360. But this option only allows ONE DVD to play, not allowing storage.

Second best = from HDD. Usually movie files are ripped into particular format, often in smaller filesize to save space. This option allows Video on Demand like capability, but need to select the right encoding tools to preserve original source Image Quality (IQ).

Im currently doing this with Windows Media Encoder, with WMV 9.0 Professional and WMA 9.0, with select SDK dlls. From what i read, the only other format that would be on par with the IQ that i get from encoding with WME, is Divx at high bitrate. But if i do rip the movies into DiVx/Xvid, then the end result file needs to go through a second transcoding using Transcode360, which encodes into an MPEG file i believe. And these file formats from the transcoding process, are not up to my liking, as substantial IQ degradation occurs. I suspect that even when you have preset the video bitrate to a high value, say 9800kbps, with audio running at 320kbps 5.1 AC3, it is the nature of the codecs used by the Transcode360 programs and the nature of their encoding(video is Variable Bitrate(VBR), i believe, while audio is Constant Bitrate(CBR)) that degrades it too much to my liking.

A properly encoded WMV using WME at 2300kbps video bitrate, and 386kbps multichannel 5.1 WAV( AC3 ripped and separated into discrete channels), beats the end-result of Trancode360 IMO. I have tried this using DIvx Pro, even bought the program bundle, so that i have access to the codecs, the end result is very impressive once you turned it into high bitrate Divx. But once the transcoding occurs, the end result at the XB360 side is disappointing.

Of course, if you're not as picky as i am regarding IQ, then Transcode360 does the job satisfactorily. Me, im just cursed with eyes that can nitpick things on screen even when i didnt want to.

This post has been edited by stringfellow: Jun 17 2006, 07:41 PM

Even if his laptop runs MCE, he would have to set his built in wireless to act as an access point. If i am not mistaken, MC-to-360 does not allow having the MCe-machine connectint to the 360 using AdHoc protocol.

Unless your laptop running MCE able to run your wireless setup as an access point, then you are stuck with Media Connect ONLY. Correct me if im wrong, fellas.

Scout around for price for the Xbox Live Vision camera, can get for me the suggested retail price? I'll be going to the States from 13th till 22nd personally to get the camera.

Enough of the Ot methinks, let the thread get back to MCE discussions.