Xbox streaming AVI - please help with settings!

[gui3]

Hello all.

I'm trying to create files that will stream from windows home server to my XBOX. WHS and media player will not accept MP4 files into the media sharing library, so I need to go with AVI.

THESE ARE XBOX'S AVI CAPABILITIES
File Extensions: .avi, .divx
Containers: AVI
Video Profiles: MPEG-4 Part 2, Simple & Advanced Simple Profile
Video Bitrate: 5 Mbps with resolutions of 1280 x 720 at 30fps
Audio Profiles: Dolby Digital 2 channel and 5.1 channel
Audio Max Bitrate: No restrictions

I've tried a few, and they *look* good...but:
- they'll play for about 2 minutes, then the picture and sound starts skipping until i get error 69-80070057
- if i try to skip forward or back, the picture and sound get skippy and it breaks down.

SETTINGS ON MY LAST ATTEMPT:
bitrate - 5000kbps
MPEG4
AVI file
ffmpeg encoder
audio 5.1 and Dolby II @ 320kbps

with those settings, the picture and sound were great until it died.

any suggestions? i just have to get a preset ready and then i'm going to put my entire DVD collection on the server.

[ichthus]

I was about to post the same topic, but I seem to have a *little* more success than you.

I have been successful ripping a DVD by only changing these settings after startup:
Encoder: Xvid
Audio Encoder: AC3
AVI file
Track 1: 1: English 5.1

This works great. The bitrate is obviously lower than you are doing, but the picture looks decent. My main concern is the 5.1 audio. It does work for me, but here's the problem I am having: If I stop the video and go back and resume from where I stopped last, the audio and video get real skippy like you are describing. If I start from the beginning again it works fine again.

Xvids I download from the internet that have 5.1 audio work fine and can resume just fine.

Maybe you can try my settings and see if you experience the same issues?

[ichthus]

I should clarify... I am using an xBox 360... I am not sure if you are by your post topic.

[gui3]

yes, i am using a 360....does the video you made add to the WMP library?

using your settings - did you have room to bump up the quality?

i would like a solution that allows me to skip around on the video

[ichthus]

yes, it adds into the WMP 11 library. Even though it does not show a thumbnail it will still play on the 360. However I do get the problems with resuming play.

I will try a higher quality setting, but I am doubtful a bigger/higher quality file is going to work any better than the lower quality one. I am testing the same video settings with MP3 audio as we speak to see if it is related to the 5.1 or not.

[ichthus]

Ok a bit of an update... apparently I wasnt letting it play long enough. I am experiencing the same problems as you. After playing for 2 or 3 minutes (from the beginning), I start to get the jumping just as you describe. So far the video hasn't actually stopped with an error or anything, but it is definitely annoying. I also get major jittery-ness after fast forwarding.

Downloaded avi's still work great.

[gui3]

update from me:

again, what i'm looking for is a preset i can use that will give me reasonably good DVD backups, in AVI format so WMP will recognize them and they'll stream to the xbox360

i tried the following:

AVI, H.264, 720x480, 1500kbps, AC3 5.1 Dolby II - won't play on xbox, barely plays in WMP11 (will play but won't let me seek)

AVI, MPEG4, MP3 audio, XVID encoder, 2500kbps, 720x304, AC3 Dolby Surround, 128kbps audio - plays, resumes, and seeks (well) on xbox, but audio & video gets jittery when i seek. did not crash, but after a few minutes of play it got jittery even though i had not tried to fast-forward.

OTHER SOFTWARE:

VisualHub @ AVI, Home Theater, "Go Nuts" - low resolution but search and resume works on XBOX

Videora @ H.264 Max quality - low resolution, but search and resume wroks on xbox.


i'm going to keep messing with the settings. i'm hoping it's not one of the smaller advanced tab settings, because i have no idea what they do.

[gui3]

New test, and a new twist on things:

i copied a file to a portable hard drive and connected it directly to the 360 via USB.

the file played at the same quality as the source, but all the skipping and jittering problems were solved.

these were the video settings:
AVI, MPEG4, MP3 audio, XVID encoder, 2500kbps, 720x304, AC3 Dolby Surround, 128kbps audio

so, does that mean it's a network problem?

[gui3]

i'll post another attempt....i hope somebody can give me some help here.

AVI file, MPEG4, MP3 audio, XVID encoder, 1000kbps, 720x304, AC3 Dolby Surround, 128kbps audio, 983MB file size - played well, but gets skippy/choppy when i resume or seek.

incidentally, i tried an older AVI file (i dont know how it was encoded) at about 860MB, and it worked completely fine.

wtf.

[gui3]

another update:

i used MacTheRipper to rip a DVD directly from the VOB files on the DVD (~4GB total) and then encoded them using VisualHub on the mac.

the resulting file is 3.2GB and...streams from the PC to the XBOX without any problems.

so, i guess this means it isnt my network, but Handbrake that's the problem...the files that were screwing up were ~900mb.

[jbrjake]

As I've explained before here:

AVI should not be streamed. HandBrake certainly doesn't futz with it to make it easy to stream.

AVI was never designed to be a streaming video format. HandBrake's avi muxer is a barebones one titer wrote. It just does plain jane AVI.

VisualHub is just a pretty skin on the command line tool ffmpeg, which has a much more robust AVI muxer.

Streaming video should be done with MP4, like ISO intended. Your problem is that you have very limited hardware with even more limited proprietary software, which prevents you from using formats that were actually designed to be streamed, so you need to use software that extends the format you do have to be streamable.

[gui3]

ah, thanks for the info.

so, are you saying that the reason why the visualhub file streamed so much better is because it's encoding with ffmpeg instead of xvid?

i had tried handbrake's ffmpeg (AVI, MPEG-4, ffmpeg, 5000kbps) and it had the same problems as the xvid.



if i could only stream mp4's to the xbox without having to engage in freaky-deaky transcoding, i'd be golden.

[jbrjake]

so, are you saying that the reason why the visualhub file streamed so much better is because it's encoding with ffmpeg instead of xvid?

No, I'm saying the reason the VisualHub file streamed so much better is because it's muxing with ffmpeg's AVI muxer instead of HandBrake's AVI muxer.

[elrondo]

That's all well and good, but you can't stream 5.1 AC3 with MP4 on a 360. And the 360 doesn't support 5.1aac yet. The best way I've seen to encode mpeg4 and 5.1 AC3 is with AVI, but sadly my performance over the network has been the same with handbrake. I'll give visualhub a try.

As I've explained before here:

AVI should not be streamed. HandBrake certainly doesn't futz with it to make it easy to stream.

AVI was never designed to be a streaming video format. HandBrake's avi muxer is a barebones one titer wrote. It just does plain jane AVI.

VisualHub is just a pretty skin on the command line tool ffmpeg, which has a much more robust AVI muxer.

Streaming video should be done with MP4, like ISO intended. Your problem is that you have very limited hardware with even more limited proprietary software, which prevents you from using formats that were actually designed to be streamed, so you need to use software that extends the format you do have to be streamable.

[Meilo]

As jbrjake said, this is prolly a muxer problem. If you have a windows box, you can use Avimux Gui to demux/mux the video and audio stream to an Avi, as it involves stuff like audio interleaving that Avimux handles for you. You could also use MeGui (on windows) to encode to Xvid too.

The Xbox 360 supports MPEG4 Part2, not Xvid or Divx directly. Although both are implementations of the MPEG4 Part2 they (may) have other features. This means not all avis encoded to xvid or divx will play 100%, which is why you may have success with some and not on others.

If you want 5.1 audio on the 360, there is no choice but to use MPEG4 Part2 +AC3 in avi, or wmv+wma pro.

If you go the avi route, it's generally not worth to encode with a Qf (quality factor or frame quality) above .28 (mostly waste of bits) with Divx/Xvid. You can see how it works here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xvid_Qf

That way you can determine the bitrate (and why 5000 kbps with MPEG4 Part2 for a SD video is overkill) you need for a given quality, frame rate (NTSC DVDs are usually 23.976) and a video size.

I usually just encode at 2000 kbps with Divx Pro 6.8 (2-pass mode) and mux the video with the original AC3 track from the DVD with AviMux Gui. The result is a very good image and perfect audio (sometimes the xbox chokes for a couple of seconds but gets back to normal, usually at the start of a movie).

The windows media route is just painful and slooooooooooooooooow. If you want 5.1, go avi (you can try wmv if you have the patience), else just endode with handbrake (or Megui) to MP4 with h.264 + AAC (with dolby pro logic II). Just set your receiver to DPL II and you won't really notice that much of a difference other than a slightly lower overall volume (from the downmix of the 6 channels).

[ichthus]

I usually just encode at 2000 kbps with Divx Pro 6.8 (2-pass mode) and mux the video with the original AC3 track from the DVD with AviMux Gui. The result is a very good image and perfect audio (sometimes the xbox chokes for a couple of seconds but gets back to normal, usually at the start of a movie).

Meilo, thanks for the info, very good stuff. So, just a question, what do you use to stream these videos to the 360? Windows media player? or something else? Oh and one other thing, what do you use to extract the AC3 track from the DVD so you can mux it using AviMux Gui?

[Meilo]

I use both windows media player (on my xp box) and windows media center (on my vista box). Media center sure looks nice, but seeking is a lot better/faster with media player. To extract the AC3 tracks I use megui (D2V creator tool I think) ,it uses DGIndex/DGMPGDec and you could use it directly (http://neuron2.net/), but I just use megui and set to demux all audio tracks.

[aviatorgeek]

All,

I've been trying to achieve what is discussed here, using Linux tools (namely dvdrip, mencode and transcode).

Already came to the same conclusions as discussed above, so I've been trying to encode one of my DVDs using:
- XVID codec
- copy 5.1 AC3 Dolby tracks as is
- AVI container

And I have the following problem: I can generate an AVI file that plays just fine on the Xbox 360 (no jitter, audio and video perfectly in sync), but whenever I try to skip forward or back (with the bumper buttons on the remote), or fast forward / rewind (with the triggers), the screen goes blank, the Xbox stops playing, and a message "Content may not be supported" is displayed with some error code (the error code is useless as I have been unable to find the meaning of the codes).

It makes no difference whether I play the file off a USB storage device connected to the Xbox, or over the network.

After a *lot* of trial and error, I've determined that what causes the problem is actually the AC3 audio track. If I remux the same video track with an MP3 version of the audio track, the forwarding/rewinding problem goes away. Completely.

I too have found AVI files on the net, containing a 6 channel AC3 track, that play just fine and don't exhibit this problem.
Hence, yes, it sounds like a muxing problem, but I can't put my finger on it: what's different between the files that work fine and those that don't? Any insight much appreciated.

[ichthus]

Sorry for not replying with my findings... so, here ya go. I believe I have found what works is this:

XVid
AC3 - 5.1 setting
2300 kbps (but this setting doesnt matter really...)

This looks and sounds great on the computer, but experiences problems on the 360 with playback as we have been saying. So, I tried the suggestion by Mello to use AviMux Gui. I didn't have to do any extra steps (like pull the audio off the DVD)... I just took the output file from Handbrake and opened it in AviMux Gui and it takes the video and AC3 audio from the avi file and remuxes them together in a new AVI file. This seems to work well for me. I'd be interested to see if this fixes the problem for others? I'm streaming the AVI from WMP. Sometimes it hiccups a little at the very beginning of playback (I assume its a buffering issue), but after that it plays fine (fast forward, rewind, resume, etc).

[dbr]

I have ripped a bunch of DVD's as XviDs (H.264 is better quality and such, but all my other content is divx or xvid, so I kept with it for consistency if nothing else - it's also faster to encode and such)

Anyway, I had the same problem: videos would play for a few minutes, then start slowing down, stuttering, going out of sync. Eventually it would give the "media not supported" error.

I really didn't want to have to re-encode the stuff from DVD (although I still have the VIDEO_TS I ripped using MacTheRipper, it still takes a lot of CPU and time)

I ripped the TV episodes at 1000kbits using the XviD encoder, 2-pass, AC-3 audio (2.0ch), mixed to stereo. Although the bitrate and such settings are completely arbitrary to the problem (until you get near the 5MB/s limit anyway).. The issue is the XviD encoder..

Now, err, the solution: mencoder \o/

Code: Select all

mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -o fixed.avi broken.avi

Running it on a ~20 minute TV episode (about 250MB) took 12 seconds - slightly faster than reencoding (and it uses practically no CPU)..

You can get mencoder from the MPlayer site ( http://www.mplayerhq.hu ), or from apt-get/yum on linux, or fink/macports on OS X (Or just download the source, in terminal cd Downloads/mplayer*/ && ./configure && make && sudo make install # as I did), and there is also windows binaries.

..now, to find a decent, free UPnP media server..

[jbrjake]

The issue is the XviD encoder..

Now, err, the solution: mencoder \o/

Code: Select all

mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -o fixed.avi broken.avi

Uh, what?

If the "issue" is the XviD encoder, then copying the XviD track bit-by-bit would not have solved it. Clearly this is a container issue, which is not surprising since vanilla AVI is not meant for streaming, while mencoder does ODML.

[dbr]

Uh, what?

If the "issue" is the XviD encoder, then copying the XviD track bit-by-bit would not have solved it. Clearly this is a container issue, which is not surprising since vanilla AVI is not meant for streaming, while mencoder does ODML.

By "XviD encoder" I was referring to to encoding the file using the xvid setting. Regardless of the technical term for what "broke" the files, mencode'ing the files sorts the problem..

[swd]

Hi

My problem is as follows. Using XBMC on the original xbox my DIVx's worked / streamed perfectly. I now have an xbox360 and after the recent DIVX update I then tried to view my movies through the 360...the problem now is the poor streaming and sound stuttering as mentioned through this thread, I also get the error message 'error 69-80070057'.

I have always used Dr Divx to convert my movies to the divx format and as said they work fine on the xbox but not the 360, can anyone explain why and what I need to do? I am tempted to buy a network media player, possibly the D-Link DSM-330 but will this have the same problem?

Thanks in advance to any help that can be given.

[rhester]

This isn't an Xbox or DivX support forum - if you aren't having trouble with HandBrake-created content, you're not likely to find much help here.

Rodney

[iggy23]

I just wish MS would support the MP4 standard more. It's practically non-existent, even in Vista (even if you install codecs, Windows Media Player and WMC don't want to know). They could push out an update for the 360 that supports 264, I know they were taking about updates for other extenders.

RE: the streaming problem, I was looking into this yesterday, and the only way to really do it on the 360 is to use WMV. Although apparently you can encode using VC1 (the same format that the HD-DVDs used) and it works. Not tested, but may be worth a look.

I was going to buy a 360 exactly for this reason, as I'm not much of a gamer, until I found out that my large 264 library wouldn't play in it.