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:	491286 times

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Page 7 of 8: TVersity: Playing the MP4 file on your Xbox 360

Step 7A: TVersity: Playing the MP4 file on your Xbox 360

There are two main methods to getting the MP4 to play on your Xbox 360. The first is to use a USB drive/CD/DVD and play it from these media on your Xbox 360 - this is the easiest way to set up, since you all need to do is to copy the MP4 file to the USB/CD/DVD, and then insert it into your Xbox 360.

The other way is a bit harder to set up initially, but it will make it easier in the future to play your MP4 files, since you can play them directly from your computer. Basically it involves setting up a UPnP server on your computer and then telling the Xbox 360 to connect to it - the Xbox 360 will then be able to read all the media files on your computer and play them back.

There are a further two ways to set up a UPnP server on your system that this guide will cover - one is to use the free TVersity software, and the other is to use the Microsoft Zune software. The pros and cons of using either software is listed below:

TVersity:

Pro:
- Supports all kinds of H.264 files
Con:
- Installation may require knowledge of port forwarding, firewall configuration (open port)

Zune:

Pro:
- Installation is easier
Con:
- Installation, while easy, takes a long time
- Only supports Baseline and Main Profile H.264 files

If you have decided to use TVersity, continue on reading this page. If not, skip straight to Step 7B on the next page.

So you have decided to use TVersity. Excellent. First, download and install TVersity. When you get to the last step of the installation, there is an option to "Install Codecs", which will install some video and audio codecs that are needed by TVersity. However, if you already have a codec pack like K-Lite Codec Pack (highly recommended) installed, then you probably don't need to enable this option at all (and enabling it might cause further problems - installing codecs over your existing setup might cause everything to fail). If you do run into codec related problems, then you can re-install with the "Install Codecs" option enabled, or install the K-Lite Codec Pack which is my preferred method. No codecs are needed for H.264 playback on the Xbox 360 though, since we are not using transcoding and only transcoding requires the installation of codecs.

Otherwise, installation is pretty straight forward, but if at the end you get an error message about TVersity not being able to start, ignore it. Reboot your system when the installation is completed. Also be sure to check the TVersity system requirements page to ensure you have met all the requirements (Windows Media Player 9 or above and Flash 7 especially).

Make sure the TVersity server is now running (look for the TVersity tray icon, right click on it and choose "Start Sharing" and wait until the icon turns green - if the TVersity tray icon is not shown, go to your Start Menu and start TVersity from there).

TVersity Setup

TVersity by default uses the port 41952 (this can be changed later on), and you will need to open up your personal firewall to allow this port to be used by TVersity. The exact procedure on how to do this depends on the brand of firewall you use, but if you use Windows Firewall, here are the instructions:

Click on the "Start" button -> Control Panel -> Windows Firewall
Go to the "Exceptions" section of the Windows Firewall configuration tool to see the exception list
Click on "Add Program" and use the "Browse" button to locate the TVersity executable file (default location is: C:\Program Files\TVersity\Media Server\TVersity.exe) - you can also use the "Change Scope" button to limit the scope of the exception (eg. to block out access from outside your own network). Click OK until you're back to the exception list.
Click on "Add Port" and add 41952 (TCP) to be opened, again you can use the "Change Scope" function to limit access. Press "OK" to save the exception and close Windows Firewall.

Right click on the TVersity tray icon and select "Launch" or go to your Start Menu and start TVersity from there. In Tversity, go to the "Settings" section and ignore any warnings you might get about TVersity not being started.

In the "General" settings section, you can set the following options:

Media Playback Device: Set this to "Xbox 360".
Media Sharing Service: This is where you start, stop or restart the sharing service - if it is not started yet, you can click on the "Start Sharing" button to start it. The "Automatically start sharing ..." option when checked will automatically start the service whenever you start the computer.
Temporary Media Files: This specify the amount of disk space to use for caching/buffering purposes - the default 8192 MB (8 GB) setting should be more than enough.
Home Network: You can specify the port that TVersity will use (if you change the port settings, don't forget to change your firewall settings to match it), and also specify the IP address you wish to share content with (or leave it blank to allow sharing from all devices on the network).
HTTP Proxy and Maximum Timeshift are not important, so leave the default settings there.

Press the "Save" button to save the settings.

Go to the "Transcoder" settings section, you can set the following option:

When to transcode? Set this to "Only when needed" (technically, H.264 playback won't need transcoding in any case, but transcoding allows for unsupported file formats to be played back too - previously, this included DivX and XviD, but it is now natively supported by the Xbox 360 with the 2007 Fall Update). ). You don't need to enable the "Decrease the bitrate ..." option unless your network connection from the computer to your Xbox 360 is limited (eg. wireless) - enabling this option has the effect of causing even WMV/H.264 files to be transcoded when their bitrate is higher than the network limit, which will decrease quality, so don't select this option unless you have a slow network (a wired connection should be fast enough for most video, even HD video).
Maximum Video and Image Resolution: These settings allow you to specify the maximum resolution video that TVersity will transcode to (if your video has a higher resolution, it will be converted to this maximum resolution - if your video has a lower resolution, the lower resolution will be used). Setting these settings to the resolution of your TV/display panel is recommended, unless you run into performance problems, in which case you can use half the resolution of your TV/panel (eg. 640x480) for lower quality video. Note that this only affects transcoded video - natively supported video (eg. WMV by the Xbox 360) won't be affected.
Windows Media Encoder: Check the box to use DirectShow for encoding to WMV (which is the format that is accepted by the Xbox 360), and probably leave the default selection of WMV 8 as the version of WMV to use. Again, technically, this option is not needed at all when dealing with H.264 files, since the Xbox 360 supports these natively and you do not need transcoding (which is what this option is about).

Optimization: Set this to "Quality", unless you have a slow computer.
Connection Speed and Quality: Change this to match the speed of your network. Increasing this above the speed of your actual network won't help, and will only make playback buffer all the time.
Compression: Set this to "Minimum" for maximum quality and better performance (but might overwhelm your network connection if it is not fast enough - a wired connection should be fast enough for most video, even HD video).
Decoding Speed: Leave this option checked.

Press the "Save" button to save the settings.

Adding media to the Library

We will now add our media files (images, audio, video files) to the TVersity library, so that these can be accessed from your Xbox 360. Click on the "Sharing" tab to go to the sharing section.

Click on the green "+" button and select one of the options to load in your media. My preference is to store all the media that I want to share in the same folder, as opposed to having them spread out across the hard-disk. This way, you won't unnecessarily load in a bunch of media files that you don't plan on sharing.

Once you have added in all your media, the sharing section should list them. The "grey" refresh icon as opposed to the "black" one simply means that TVersity is still sorting through the media files.

Connecting to TVersity from the Xbox 360

We finally move to the Xbox 360. This tutorial assumes you've already setup the Xbox 360 for network and Internet connections.

Go to the "Media" blade and select "Video". Press the blue "X" button to go to the select source screen. Here, the name of your computer/Windows User Account should be listed. Select the computer that you wish to connect to and after a while, the shared folders on the computer will show up. Now all you have to do is to browse through the folders/files to select a video, and then play it. Couldn't be any simpler.

TVersity also shared pictures and audio files, and you can browse for those as well if you added them into the TVersity sharing section. Audio and image playback should be much more compatible than video playback, so you shouldn't run into any problems there.

There's no need to read the next page as it deals with the alternate method of using Zune instead of TVersity. So we're done

Got more questions? Post them in our H.264 Conversion/Encoding Forum and get them answered by other expert users.

If things didn't go well, then try these troubleshooting tips:

If you are unable to connect to the computer running TVersity, double check your firewall settings again. Also make sure the TVersity media sharing is actually enabled on the computer.
Make sure that the Xbox 360 is not already connected to another media server or media center. Disconnect from any connected devices.
If all else fails, then you might want to post your problem in the official TVersity support forum - remember that TVersity is still in beta, so problems are bound to be present (it's also free).

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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