Newb question, mkv - avi

Discuss about generic usage of MediaCoder.

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lupinus
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Newb question, mkv - avi

Post by lupinus » Fri Jan 04, 2008 2:20 am

Hello everyone.

I am a new user of the program and I love it, a bit tricky to get started with but I see the possibilities.

Now to my problem. Since the december upgrade from microsoft my xbox 360 is capable of playing divx and xvid, which works fine with the files I have tried. But In my library I have a couple of high res. files which I cannot play at all. They are .mkv and as I understand it, xbox 360 require wmv, avi or mpeg to play them without external on-the-fly transcoders.

So I would like some pointers how to transcode these correctly. I have tried a couple of time with different settings but the loss in quality was horrible. When transcoding from .mkv to avi, do I firstly need to make a uncompressed video file in order to compress to avi after or is it possible to transcode it direct? I got the sound working alright but video is still a puzzle for me, even though I used a high bitrate, and I dont care about the subs in the mkv either.

Source is
h.264 in a .mkv container

I want
h.264 in a .avi container

What would be the best settings for this you recon? vbr, cbr, 2pass

I would be thankful for any help

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SirAuron
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Post by SirAuron » Fri Jan 04, 2008 3:26 am

h264 is not compatible with the avi container. A few fansubbing groups have hacked their way into it and are able to distribute h264 in a avi but it's no clean solution and it's not officialy supported.

This means you either have to select a different container (mp4, mkv) or use xvid as your video codec which means bigger files or less good quality (I suppose your big files are 720P).
MediaCoder settings:

x264 (backend/source: mencoder, fps: 23,976, Fabio Sonatti's settings) + nero aac 64 in matroska

lupinus
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Post by lupinus » Fri Jan 04, 2008 9:09 pm

Thanks for the information SirAuron, it would explain why I was having trouble.

Edit:

Pretty much got the video stream worked out fine now.

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