Archive for the ‘Xbox 360, Xbox One’ Category

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Is your computer capable of playing Blu-ray/HD DVD?

Friday, June 8th, 2007

When asked this question, the most common answer people come up with is a big resounding NO (or meh), mainly because you would need to be a brain surgeon or a copyright lawyer to be able to afford the Blu-ray/HD DVD drive. But things may not be so bad – with a little bit of research, tweaking and black magic, you won’t need many many thousands of dollars to get Blu-ray/HD DVD playback going on your PC – only a couple of thousand would do.

First, read my Is your PC High Definition DVD Ready? guide to familiarise yourself with what is needed to achieve Blu-ray/HD DVD playback. Don’t be too shocked at the system requirements, it’s still early days for PC Blu-ray/HD DVD, but if you’re lucky, you may only be a high definition reader drive away from watching 1080p movies in full resolution.

Assuming you’ve got a PC good enough for HD DVD playback, your cheapest option right now is to buy the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive for $199 (has been sold for less, plus with bonus movies) and use that as your HD DVD reader drive – even if you don’t have an Xbox 360! Yes, it really does work and it’s officially supported by Microsoft too. Read this guide for full instructions. Of course, if you do have an Xbox 360, then the HD DVD add-on drive is an excellent way to introduce yourself to high definiton DVD (plus it works as a normal DVD drive too, so you can play DVD movies on it as opposed to using the built-in, disc-scratching drive on the Xbox 360).

Posted in High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Is your computer capable of playing Blu-ray/HD DVD?

H.264 on the Xbox 360

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

Following on from my previous blog entry on Xbox 360 H.264 playback, I’ve finally had the chance to test it out when the Spring Update was released yesterday.

So far, it’s a mixed bag, mainly due to niggly issues related to MP4 media sharing (or the lack of) in Windows Media Player.

What I have found so far:

  • Use the Zune software for media sharing, since it supports MP4
  • Use Baseline or Main Profile, since Zune only seem to support these
  • If you are using the Sharktooth’s x264 profile in MeGUI, you have to set the max bitrate to 10000 (from 25000), enable the Level restrictions to 4.1 (you will have to turn off “P4x4”)
  • Use AAC LC encoding, not HC. I used the Nero Digital encoder, LC 96 Kbps profile
  • When using the “AutoEncoder” function in MeGUI, try to make sure the “average bitrate” (even if you are using a set file size) doesn’t go too close to the 10 Mbps limit for the Xbox 360. From what I can understand, frames over 10 Mbps will still play, but artifacts and paused playback may result
  • Edit (11th May, 2007): With 1080p clips, use Baseline only
  • 720p, 1080p works well, as long as you stick to the restrictions above

No doubt I will know more tomorrow after more testing of 1080p, and I will have a guide written before the week’s end.

The playback quality is quite good, as expected with H.264, and I would really like to see some more TV episode downloads being released in this format ready, encoded to be compatible with the Xbox 360.

Edit (11th May, 2007): I have finished writing the Xbox 360 H.264 Conversion Guide.

And I’ve finally churned away from iiNet to Internode as my ADSL provider (reasons listed in this blog entry). I’m now downloading at more than 600 KB/s and uploading at around 40 KB/s, much better than my previous 155 KB/s and 26 KB/s. When I first connected, I was only doing 250 KB/s, until I used Unblocka to tweak my connection.

Posted in Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on H.264 on the Xbox 360

Make your own DVDs and Windows Media Encoder

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

I’ve just finished writing a guide for DVD Flick. DVD Flick is a really easy to use tool, especially for making DVDs from your DivX/XviD files (TV episode downloads anyone?). Best of all, it’s free.

It won’t create DVDs with beautiful menus and other fancy features, but things like multiple audio tracks and subtitles are not too difficult to add in. The output quality is quite good as well, although this largely depends on the quality of the source file. Give it a try and I think you’ll be impressed.

The other guide I wrote is about AVI to WMV conversion, trying to make these files playable on the Xbox 360. I used the free Windows Media Encoder 9 software, which unlike DVD Flick, is not as straight forward or well designed. It will work well when the input file is “Microsoft approved” (ie. WMV files), but for anything else (like DivX/XviD), it can cause a lot of problems. The software itself is quite powerful, with support for a lot of different types of encodings, including streaming and VC-1, but you can just feel that it wasn’t really designed for use by your average/newbie user (which is no surprise then that the URL for the software on Microsoft’s website has changed to add “forpros” in the URL), unlike DVD Flick.

Posted in DVD, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Make your own DVDs and Windows Media Encoder

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 »

Playing video on game consoles

Friday, April 6th, 2007

If you’ve read TPP’s about page, then you would already know that I like gaming (owner of Wii + Xbox 360, or as I would like to call “The Winning Combination”™), movies, video technology and Arsenal.

To play back an Arsenal movie, encoded using DivX or XviD, on my Xbox 360, would then be the trifecta.

Unfortunately, thanks to the concept of money (more precisely, the concept of making lots of it by having proprietary video formats), neither my Xbox 360 nor my Wii can play back DivX or XviD movies without some serious tinkering.

And with this in mind, I finally decided to do a bit of work on Digital Digest to see if I could come up with a way to do this.

It took several days, handfulls of hairs being pulled out, 16 cans of Coke, a broken foot from kicking my desk in frustration, a sore back from lifting the Xbox 360 around the place and some nasty emails being sent to random people on my mailing list, but I finally finished writing two guides that sort of did what I wanted to do: Nintendo Wii Video Conversion Guide and Xbox 360 DivX, XviD Playback Guide.

They’re not perfect solutions, far from it, but at least the possibility is now there.

Come on Nintendo and Microsoft, add native DivX/XviD playback to your game consoles and see their sales skyrocket.

Posted in Gaming, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Playing video on game consoles

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