What movie format do you use?

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Ailyn Zel
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What movie format do you use?

Post by Ailyn Zel »

Hey everyone,

I was just curious what movie format most folks are using? To keep size down and for the best speeds from a networked hard drive, I generally stick to DIVX/XVID. What about everyone else?
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Re: What movie format do you use?

Post by chunk1982 »

I like mkv I personally dont think you can beat the compression rate vs video quality
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Re: What movie format do you use?

Post by Geeba »

Usually Xvid/AVI for the xbox..... not had much luck with MKV....
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Re: What movie format do you use?

Post by BuZz »

mkv is just a container ( that is well supported in xbmc and very flexible in terms of what data it can hold). It all depends what you are putting in it.
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Re: What movie format do you use?

Post by odellkevin »

XVID. I've played around with 264/mp4's for a while, but...for me...they take twice as long to encode, the XBOX struggles to play them, and no matter what settings I use, I can't seem to get better or even equal quality than I can with XVID at only about a 10 - 15% increase in file size. I've tried hundreds of test encodes, using dozens of different softwares with scores of different settings, but I always seem to come back to XVID. I'm happy with the file size, (~500mb per hour), I'm happy with the quality (except for a little bit of blocking in dark scenes) on my 60" LCD, and XBMX4XBOX runs them all painlessly.
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Re: What movie format do you use?

Post by sixties keith »

Usually Xvid/AVI for me. havent had much luck with mp4 and mkv but from downloading they usually need to be converted before smooth playback on the xbox can be achieved with these.

however the compression on mkv is far better. a thing i noticed which used buzz's method on ffmpeg to convert 720p mkv movies for the xbox.
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Re: What movie format do you use?

Post by BuZz »

there is still some confusion going on here. MKV is a container format that contains video/audio data. how compressed it is, is down to the codecs used and bitrate. mkv is the most flexible container and well supported by ffmpeg, hence it is a good choice for transcoding to. avi has plenty of limitations.

you can put virtually any video / audio compression in an mkv. It just so happens that is common for people to use h264, but that is the only connection that codec has with mkv.. mkv is also used as it can have embedded subtitles and multiple audio streams etc etc
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Re: What movie format do you use?

Post by shady7 »

I've had always pretty good results using handbrake. Settings mkv container with ffmeg-4 between 2000-3000 bitrate 2 pass encoding
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Re: What movie format do you use?

Post by Ailyn Zel »

shady7 wrote:I've had always pretty good results using handbrake. Settings mkv container with ffmeg-4 between 2000-3000 bitrate 2 pass encoding
Thanxx for that comment. My next post was going to ask everyone what they thought was the best way to encode videos from DVD sources. I have a couple of fantastic FanEdits that I would like to add to my collection, not to mention some DVDs as well. I have never had good luck with the XBOX playing DVD media directly.
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Re: What movie format do you use?

Post by Ailyn Zel »

BuZz wrote:there is still some confusion going on here. MKV is a container format that contains video/audio data. how compressed it is, is down to the codecs used and bitrate. mkv is the most flexible container and well supported by ffmpeg, hence it is a good choice for transcoding to. avi has plenty of limitations.
you can put virtually any video / audio compression in an mkv. It just so happens that is common for people to use h264, but that is the only connection that codec has with mkv.. mkv is also used as it can have embedded subtitles and multiple audio streams etc etc
Thanxx Buzz. thepitt has an excellent post that mentions that as well: http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewt ... stax#p4514
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HIGH DEF Reply

Post by 2 Bunny »

+1 for FF MPEG. Incase anyone else is interested in getting 720p videos to play on XBMC with perfect framerate, just download FFMPEG, open command prompt, change the target directory to where you downloaded, and issue the following command:
ffmpeg -i "PATH TO FILE\source_video.mkv" -scodec copy -acodec copy -vcodec mpeg4 -b:v 3000k -maxrate 5000k -bufsize 4096k -s 1280x720 -f matroska -y "PATH TO OUTPUT FILE\output_file_name.mkv"
With that, you're pretty much golden for 720p video.
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Re: HIGH DEF Reply

Post by Ailyn Zel »

2 Bunny wrote:+1 for FF MPEG. Incase anyone else is interested in getting 720p videos to play on XBMC with perfect framerate, just download FFMPEG, open command prompt, change the target directory to where you downloaded, and issue the following command:
ffmpeg -i "PATH TO FILE\source_video.mkv" -scodec copy -acodec copy -vcodec mpeg4 -b:v 3000k -maxrate 5000k -bufsize 4096k -s 1280x720 -f matroska -y "PATH TO OUTPUT FILE\output_file_name.mkv"
With that, you're pretty much golden for 720p video.
Thanxx 2Bunny. What if I want to make the file smaller? Example, I have a mkv that is over 8GB (dont ask me why). Would love to cut it down to maybe 2GB. I can send you a PM to take this offline. Thanxx.
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REPLY TO UNCREATIVE TITLE IV Reply

Post by 2 Bunny »

Ailyn Zel wrote:
2 Bunny wrote:+1 for FF MPEG. Incase anyone else is interested in getting 720p videos to play on XBMC with perfect framerate, just download FFMPEG, open command prompt, change the target directory to where you downloaded, and issue the following command:
ffmpeg -i "PATH TO FILE\source_video.mkv" -scodec copy -acodec copy -vcodec mpeg4 -b:v 3000k -maxrate 5000k -bufsize 4096k -s 1280x720 -f matroska -y "PATH TO OUTPUT FILE\output_file_name.mkv"
With that, you're pretty much golden for 720p video.
Thanxx 2Bunny. What if I want to make the file smaller? Example, I have a mkv that is over 8GB (dont ask me why). Would love to cut it down to maybe 2GB. I can send you a PM to take this offline. Thanxx.
For that I'm not really sure. Perhaps a video conversion software (or even FF MPEG with a few different commands) could just convert it in a way that would just make it take up less space. I know you said not to ask, but do you have any idea why the file is so large? Is it a long video or of particularly high resolution or bitrate?
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Re: What movie format do you use?

Post by poshea »

If you use the above ffmpeg command line, you can lower the file size by lowering the video data rate. The video data rate in this example is 3000k (or approx 3mb/s). (This is the ideal setting for balancing quality/performance). If you lower this number, you will lower the resulting videos file size. Obviously this also impacts on the video quality. I have recently encoded at 2200k and the file sizes were considerably reduced whilst quality still reasonable. You could experiment with different data rates.

ffmpeg -i "PATH TO FILE\source_video.mkv" -scodec copy -acodec copy -vcodec mpeg4 -b:v 3000k -maxrate 5000k -bufsize 4096k -s 1280x720 -f matroska -y "PATH TO OUTPUT FILE\output_file_name.mkv"

I tried also lowering the resolution (1280x720) - however this didn't make much difference in the resulting file size... So may as well leave this setting alone.
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