Articles - > Xbox 360 H.264 Conversion Guide

Title:	Xbox 360 H.264 Conversion Guide
Description:	This guide shows you how to convert DVD/AVI/DivX/XviD/MOV files to H.264 video for Xbox 360 compatibility
Author/Publisher:	DVDGuy
Ease of use:	Intermediate
Software Used:	MeGUI, Nero Digital Audio Decoder/Encoder, TVersity
Page Viewed:	491295 times

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karto: Great guide! I've been trying to...
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Page 4 of 8: MeGUI: Video Encoding Options

Step 4: MeGUI: Video Encoding Options

We'll now set up the H.264 encoding options in the x264 encoder. This step has the most options to configure, and this is where Xbox 360 compatibility is determined. This guide won't go into detail about all the options, just the ones you need to ensure Xbox 360 compatibility - and if you need further explanation of the options, refer to our x264 Options Explained article.

In the MeGUI "Input" section, select "x264" as the "Codec". We do not need to set a container as we will do that later using the "AutoEncode" function.

Xbox 360's H.264 video support is limited to the following (you don't need to understand what it all means):

AVC Profile: Baseline, Main or High Profiles
Maximum bitrate: 10 Mbps (although testing shows stuttering only occuring above 20 Mbps)
AVC Level: 4.1
No B-Pyramid and P4x4 support

For the "Video Profiles" option in MeGUI, you should see several pre-defined encoding profiles for H.264 encoding (a profile is a saved set of encoding settings). When this guide was last updated, the process was to take one of the "CE" profiles and then add the above restrictions to make new profiles. But with the new version of MeGUI, new profiles were made and one specifically for the Xbox 360 (and the PS3) was produced. To compare the new "PD" profiles with the old "CE" profiles, please refer to this page.

There are two profiles available to use, the "PD-PS3-Xbox360" profile and the "PD-PS3-Xbox360_Fast". The "Fast" profile will provide faster encoding at the expense of quality.

The problem with both of these profiles, however, is that they are both High Profile profiles, meaning that software like Zune will not support them (the second section of this guide will cover how to connect your Xbox 360 to your PC so you can play/stream files off it, and using Zune is one of the options). This is easily solved though, because you can press the "Config" button to open the profile editing area. Next, select the "PD-PS3-Xbox360" or "PD-PS3-Xbox360_Fast" profiles, depending on which you want to edit. Change the "AVC Profile" setting to "Main" or "Baseline". Then press the "New" button, and enter in a new name for the profile.

We can determine which of these profiles we should use for our encoding. You can use the Baseline profile for all encodes, it's the fastest and it will be the most compatible. Using the Main Profile will improve quality (at the expense of encoding speed, and some compatibility issues). Using one of the "High Profile" profiles will further improve quality (and reduce encoding speed), but compatibility might be an issue (we had no playback problems once we disabled "B-Pryamid"). The main compatibility issue is that High Profile files will not show up in the Zune software, and therefore, not show up on the Xbox 360 for playback - the only way around this at the moment is to copy the file to a USB drive or CD/DVD media and play the file from there (hopefully a software fix will solve this problem in Zune).

It is recommended that you use one of the "High Profile" profiles (eg. "PD-PS3-Xbox360"), as this would ensure maximum quality. You can always share the file with your console using TVersity, which will support High Profile encodes.

Select the profile you want to use (eg. "PD-PS3-Xbox360") from the "Video Profiles" drop down menu.

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Article Navigation:

Page 1: Introduction + Installation
Page 2: DVD/MPEG-2 Conversion
Page 3: MeGUI: AviSynth Script Creator
Page 4: MeGUI: Video Encoding Options <--
Page 5: MeGUI: Audio Encoding Options
Page 6: MeGUI: Cutting, Bitrate Calculator and AutoEncode
Page 7: TVersity: Playing the MP4 file on your Xbox 360
Page 8: Zune: Playing the MP4 file on your Xbox 360

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User Comments:

Great guide! I've been trying to convert some Xvid to h264 without luck - this guide worked the first time :) I only have one problem - the audio on my converted file is out of sync (<1 sec early). Any ideas what I can do? The source was an avi (Xvid / AC3) in case that matters.

Thank You! I don't like the Zune software as it is way to much bloat and the install is ridiculous when all I want is a streaming program. I recommend giving Tversity a try as I got it streaming the h264 file to the 360 without transcoding to wmv.

Yes, TVersity was updated just shortly after I had finishing writing the guide with a patch that fixed incompatibility problems with the new Spring update. The next version of the guide might use TVersity, although it is slightly troublesome to setup as it requires a port to be opened in your firewall

Also, with Tversity, I was able to stream High Profile without a problem.

Until I update the guide for TVersity, for those that want to use it but don't know where to begin, have a look at our earlier Xbox 360 DivX/XviD playback guide, which has TVersity and connecting it to Xbox 360 instructions: http://www.digital-digest.com/articles/Xbox_360_DivX_XviD_Playback_Guide_page3.html

Actually it looks like TVersity is still a bit fiddly when it comes to MP4/H.264 support - it does support MP4, but it will transcode the video to WMV and then stream to the Xbox 360 - huge CPU requirements and defeats the purpose of using H.264 in the first place (poor quality). You can probably modify the profiles and tell TVersity that the Xbox 360 now supports MP4/H.264 files natively, but it's a bit fiddly (see this thread: http://forums.tversity.com/viewtopic.php?t=5138). The next release should hopefully fix all these problems, or until someone comes up with an updated profile. So for now, it's Zune.

Yes, I did the bit of fiddling with the profiles.xml and then made sure to tell it to never transcode and that's how I got the streaming to work.

Just so you know, You also need to have Avisynth 2.5 installed before you can install and update MeGUI. You can grab a copy here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/avisynth2/

I've updated the guide to add in the AviSynth install

I'm converting from Xvix/DivX AVIs to H.264 MP4s, but I keep getting an error after autoencoding saying that I have an incorrect colorspace and it needs to be converted to YV12. I clicked "Yes" and continued, but the MP4 file that is outputted looks washed out when compared to the colors of the original Xvid file. Is this normal and is there a way to fix this? Also, how do I find the bitrate of my original Xvid file so I can set the bitrate in the "bitrate calculator" to 80%-90% of it's original value as you suggest? I would also like to say great guide, it's been very helpful and I would have been completely stuck without it. Now I just how MS update WMP11 to work with MP4s so I can stop using the Zune software.

rapidgame: The "incorrect colorspace" error is normal, just click yes and that should be fine. The washed out colors may be due to your encoding settings, or even your decoder (h.264 codec, player) setting. As for bit-rate, just use 80 to 90% of the original file size of the AVI file.

Thanks for the quick reply DVDGuy :-) I still can't figure out why the colors don't look the same on H.264, but the movies seem to look fine on my TV when I stream them from the Zune software. I'll try looking at the settings in my players to see if there's something I could change. I'm using FFDShow so I don't know if that might be where the problem is. When you say use 80-90% of the original AVI, is that when in the AutoEncode dialog? If I only use 80-90% of the original filesize in the bitrate calculator, that won't take into account the size required for the audio as well, would it? Thanks again for the great guide, I've been looking through Digital Digest and there's some really helpful stuff, definitely going into my bookmarks. I wish I could paragraph my comments, lol. ;-)

rapidgame: Try using Windows Media Player and then using the contrast/brightness/saturation, or just click on the ffdshow-video tray icon and configure the "picture properties" to your liking. When you specify an encoding file size in AutoEncode or the BItrate calculator, both takes into account the audio. If you keep the average bitrate as shown in the bitrate caculator between 800 and 900, quality should be pretty good (for DVD resolution video, 720x***).

Anyone know why I get the following error at the AAC Nero stage. Looking for job processor for job... Processor found! Starting job job1-1 at 11:53:10 PM Starting preprocessing of job... Preprocessing finished! encoder commandline: successfully started encoding Processing ended at 11:53:11 PM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Log for job job1-1 Channels=2, BitsPerSample=16, SampleRate=48000Hz C:\Program Files\megui\tools\neroaacenc\neroAacEnc.exe -ignorelength -lc -br 96000 -if - -of "D:\Rips\TENEN\VTS_01_1 T01 2_0ch 192Kbps DELAY 0ms.mp4"Error: MeGUI.AviSynthException: m2AudioAC3Source: error in file "D:\Rips\TENEN\VTS_01_1 T01 2_0ch 192Kbps DELAY 0ms.ac3" at MeGUI.AviSynthAudioEncoder.encode() ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The current job contains errors. Skipping chained jobs

I've followed this guide to convert from MKV files. Each source is fine but each output has gray flashes every second or so for the first 5 seconds to 3 minutes of the video. Check out the example here: http://www.echostring.com/videos/dd.avi I've been looking around for advice but so far have struck out. I'm following the tutorial completely and I've tried it on 3 different computers, all with the same results.

I've followed this guide and it works perfectly, as long as I play the files back on the PC. When I stream the files to the 360 though I tend to get audio sync problems which don't exist on the PC. Is there some setting here that can be tweaked for greater 360 compatibility?

I'm now also getting the audio sync problems (lags 1 sec) that karto reported.

rapidgame: Please post your question in our forum. In the meantime, you might have to try and demux the AVI using AviDemux, and then load in the video and audio portions separately into MeGUI

Just a tip that might be worth adding to the guide, you can embed an image in the MP4 file and it will display like album/cover art on the Xbox 360 if using the Zune software as the media server. This would be handy for DVD covers etc and I have tested it and works fine. The easy way to do this is with the freeware http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ which supports embedding JPG into MP4 files. Alternatively the manual way it to use MP4Box as MeGUI does not have any UI for this functionality. mp4box.exe -add "video.264" -add "audio.aac" -itags cover="cover.jpg" "out.mp4"

That's a great tip A8T8, in fact I'm already using mp3tag to embed cover art into our H.264 MP4 trailers. I will add additional instructions to the next version of the guide

I keep getting an mp4box.exe error during the mux mode at 98% anyway to fix this?

That is great, and I always use Moyea SWF to Video Converter to convert swf file to Xbox360