Archive for April 11th, 2007

H.264/MPEG-4 on the Xbox 360

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007

Most of the attention has been on the Windows Live Messenger support that will be added to the Xbox 360 during the next update (Spring Update, 7 May). But hidden (well not really) amongst the list of updates is the added support for H.264 video and MPEG-4 video:

  • H.264 video support: Up to 15 Mbps 10 Mbps, Baseline, Main, and High (up to level 4.1) Profiles with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.
  • Added MPEG-4 Part 2 video support: Up to 8 Mbps 5 Mbps, Simple Profile with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.

The H.264 support is fairly good, the 15 Mbps limit should be high enough for HD video. No multichannel audio is a shame though. MPEG-4 support is limited to SP (again no multichannel support). Better than nothing, I suppose. Still no DivX/XviD support, but at least it’s better than converting everything to WMV.

There are also a whole bunch of other video related improvements, such as improved skip forward/back (video is divided into 10 chapters automatically), switchable aspect ratios (Letterbox, Zoom, Stretch, Native). You can read the whole list here.

Posted in Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | 1 Comment »