Way to stream compressed HD to XBMC as uncompressed video?

[NinKenDo]

Hey guys, I have a lot of HD content, and I want to stream it to my Xbox over the network and have it play at 720p smoothly, without having to re-encode it all (eeeewwwwwww). The problem is like most people, I have my HD in H.264, which causes the Xbox to just shit its pants completely.

So like I said, I'm wondering if there's some kind of media server I can run which would allow me to do the decompression on my main rig, and have it stream either uncompressed or lossless compressed video to the Xbox that it could actually handle.

Is there something like this I can do? Thanks. Bonus points for something that lets me downsample a 1080p stream to 720p so I don't waste bandwidth or put the Xbox under undue stress.

[hawsey]

Maybe Plex media server could do this but not sure an app for Plex was written recently for the Xbox but I haven't tried it yet ;
So you would install plex media server on your main set up which would then trans code it before sending it to the Xbox , just thoughts here and untested

[Kevin G.]

PLEX streams natively, as long as you have your SMB shares set up to your server. I have seen issues with playback, however...usually when FF or REW. Funky stuff happens.
EDIT: I suppose I should have prefaced by saying; I use the .mkv container to rip to my server.

[Dan Dar3]

@NinKenDo
Try these for a start:
http://dandar3.blogspot.com/2010/12/vlc ... c-for.html
http://dandar3.blogspot.com/2010/12/ps3 ... oding.html

Might write another one soon for Universal Media Server.
http://lifehacker.com/universal-media-s ... 1649895677

[NinKenDo]

Thanks Dandar, do you know if Universal Media Server allows metadata and posters to work correctly on XBMC, or will I have to make do without if I go that route?

[Dan Dar3]

I don't know, sorry - I haven't looked too much into it, will definitely look at it at some point, but if you get a chance to do it sooner please share your findings, thanks.

[Tinton]

IMO high quality 576p looks better than low quality/compressed 720p. 576p is about the limit the original xbox can handle.

So what I usually do is take high quality 1080p or 720p mkvs and encode to highest quality XviD avi 576p. The original xbox plays it well and it looks good, a lot better than 480p/480i. MUCH better than DVD quality. Width doesn't seem to matter, 2.40:1 or w/e aspect ratio movies with crazy horizontal resolution play just as fine as anything else, just gotta keep the height to 576 or lower. As for a media server that automatically compresses/re-scales it for the original xbox, I'm looking for that too . Pain in the ass re-encoding everything