Topic: Enhancements for X360 video playback in a few days

[Cobra951]

Just FYI for those who may care.  The 360 will be supporting compliant AVIs and DivX files up to 1280x720, and the H.264 codec up to 1920x1080 in MP4s & MOVs.  WMVs also get that much res.  Bitrates are not limited, and it seems that they can climb up to 10-15 mbps without performance issues.  5.1 Dolby audio is supported.  Media handling in general is getting an overhaul.  Organization will be prettier.  You can hook up a FAT32-formatted external USB drive or flash card with your content, but that's nothing new.  Neither is streaming from properly formatted PCs.  I guess Zune support is new?  I really don't care.

Hopefully they've squashed the stupid bug where sometimes touching the joystick while a movie is playing freezes the system until you reboot it.  This one has caused me some major frustration.

[Quemaqua]

Interesting.  Can't say I have any desire to play video on my 360, but maybe someday if I move it to another room where it doesn't share a screen with the PC.

[scottws]

Wow that's cool.  I remember when I was playing around with my new 360 and Windows Media Connect and being extremely dissatisfied that it basically only supported Microsoft formats.  Most of my stuff is DivX, XviD, or H.264.  There was that TVersity thing someone posted that converted most formats to something the 360 could play on the fly but it was extremely buggy.

[iPPi]

I'm interested.  If this is the case, can I burn a DVD+RW with some DivX movies and play them on my 360?  If so, that would be so awesome.

[Cobra951]

I don't think you can get them to the 360 via the DVD drive.  You need to use external USB storage or streaming from a media PC.

The reason I'm most interested is that my PC *cannot* play H.264 HD videos.  The lag is horrendous.  I've tried every way I could think of, without success.  Quicktime and VideoLAN are way too slow.  And ffdshow won't render the HD content at all, though it works on lower-res H.264 vids.

[scottws]

Are you using ffdshow or ffdshow-tryouts?  ffdshow is a dead project.  ffdshow-tryouts is the living fork.

Even if you have tryouts, I can't guarantee that you'll be able to play H.264 on your PC.  It's very CPU intensive to decode.

[Cobra951]

ffdshow_rev1650_20071128_clsid.exe

That's a dead project?  Is the date bogus then, or maybe that is the "fork" you mentioned?  I'll look into it.  You're probably right, because whether I use a late-2006 ffdshow or this one, I get the same rendering failure in the HD content.  I get exactly the same ugliness instead of a picture.  I'll scout around.

I know decoding this standard is CPU-intensive.  I still think someone who can program his way out of a paper bag can make a 2.4GHz P4 do the job in real time.  Right now, it's not even close.  As usual, once it works on the latest gear, out the door it goes, and nobody bothers to optimize further.  I get the best performance out of Quicktime 7.3.  *Waits for "I told you so"s from the Apple fanboys*  At least it animates intermittently.

Oh, and the 360 update is out already.  Have not seen it yet.  I'll be signing on later.

[scottws]

Yeah I would think you would be able to watch it on that CPU.  I always use Haali Media Splitter + ffdshow-tryouts on my system and haven't had any trouble.  My old system was a AMD Athlon XP 2400+, which is the AMD equivalent of your processor.

From Wikipedia:

The first versions of ffdshow were published in April 2002, as an alternative to the DivX ;-) 3.11 and Gator-infested [1] DivX 5.02 decoders of the time, and as a way to combine the speed and quality of MPlayer with popular Windows video players. Some DirectShow decoders have since caught up with ffdshow's speed, but none matches its breadth. It continues to support more formats, new and old, as FFmpeg developers add support for them.

The main developer was Milan Cutka. When he stopped updating the project in 2006, new maintainers opened the ffdshow-tryouts as a fork, where bugfixes, stability fixes, new features, and codec updates continue. The original ffdshow project can be considered abandoned and dead. The new fork produces weekly builds, compared to the original's annual ones.