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720p play and other stuff
Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:11 am
by DemonLady
Hi
I just recover my old xbox from my idiot ass**** ex-boyfriend ( i used to owe him money ,i had hard times
) . its in a badly and beaten up state but works nevertheless. thing is the box have a screaaamig old version of XBMC, a T3CH build from 2008 (that idiot never updates) and not sure which version i have to update and how... i mean... if its safe to update from that old version. (its a softmodded box, so i don't want to screw it).
And more importantly, since i bought a plasma HDTV last week, i want to know if the xbox is capable of playing 720p content. if yes, which format or profile, im very interested on playing some 720p movies on it.
Thanks!
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:46 am
by bigkidoz
Hi, welcome to the forum . The easiest way to update is to boot up your xbox and find the xbmc install location which could be in a number of locations depending on the softmod used, once you know its location download the latest stable version from this site . If you have no data that you wish to save then simply just replace the old xbmc with the new via ftp by overwriting the existing files .
If you want to update the softmod then search for " Hexen " boot disc and update that before updating xbmc. The xbox will struggle with true 720P but seems to cope ok with 720P mp4 and mkv formats, if yours is PAL format then you will need to switch to NTSC using Enigmah via disc or xbox app and then getting a set of component AV leads , then you need to change the settings in the MS dash as well as XBMC.
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2012 6:28 pm
by DemonLady
Thanks for answering so fast.
but what do you mean with true 720p (i mean video in 1280x720, which is the native resolution of my plasma TV) is posible to play in that res. (i dont care about file size)
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:00 pm
by spicemuseum
DemonLady wrote:what do you mean with true 720p (i mean video in 1280x720, which is the native resolution of my plasma TV) is posible to play in that res. (i dont care about file size)
XBOX struggles to play H.264, which is extremely CPU intensive, without specific hardware decoding support. Thus the majority of x264 encoded 720p video at moderate bit rates will either suffer from poor frame rate (masses of dropped frames) or will simply not play at all.
If you want 720p to play then you need video encoded in a less CPU intensive scheme such as H.263 (common implementations being XVID). I've got dozens of 720p (1280x720) XVID encoded videos which play just fine.
Make sure you use a skin which doesn't chew up too much memory, that can cause the box to run out of RAM and freeze when playing 720p. Best performance from old-fashioned PMIII, but acceptable results (very few freezes) from modern skins such as Confluence Lite or SLiK.
Aside from the slightly misleading stuff about 720p, Bigkidoz's advice is all sound. Good luck.
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2012 2:28 am
by DemonLady
Im currently using the old Project Mayhem III (for nostalgia
) not sure if the HD version of PM3 can be used.
about the encoding, well im going to try XVID with VirtualDub
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2012 3:47 am
by bigkidoz
DemonLady wrote:Im currently using the old Project Mayhem III (for nostalgia
) not sure if the HD version of PM3 can be used.
about the encoding, well im going to try XVID with VirtualDub
PM3HD works fine and is probably the best skin to use that looks clean and still runs fairly light on memory.
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Mon Nov 12, 2012 9:12 pm
by spicemuseum
bigkidoz wrote:DemonLady wrote:Im currently using the old Project Mayhem III (for nostalgia
) not sure if the HD version of PM3 can be used.
PM3HD works fine and is probably the best skin to use that looks clean and still runs fairly light on memory.
SLiK and Confluence Lite use less memory than PM3.HD in my experience. PMIII uses even less than any of them.
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Tue Nov 13, 2012 10:31 am
by bigkidoz
I get the occasional out of memory with slik but never with PM3HD.
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2012 3:25 pm
by DemonLady
Funny thing is i get better results with MPEG2 than Xvid (kinda similar size too)
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2012 6:38 pm
by Dan Dar3
The problem is not the picture size, but highly compressed bitrate (amount of data for a frame) with large picture size. Encode Xvid or MP4 with lower bitrates and you can achieve the same large image size.
MPEG2 - more data to read (disk, network etc), but easier to decode (less CPU + memory).
Xvid/MP4 - less data to read (better compression), but harder to decode (more CPU + memory).
Think of picture size as a projector screen, you may think larger is better (more pixels to display). But then bitrate is the picture quality (amount of detail) - higher is better (high detail) but it takes more space to store and process, lower it too much ant it looses detail (little blocks); that's the quality ("resolution") of the picture on the projector screen.
Personally, I prefer to encode at lower resolutions (even as low as 640x360) and bump up the bitrate to fill-in for lack in resolution. Let XBMC4Xbox handle the scaling, with good picture quality you will not see much of a difference. You will see a difference in file size though and it'll require less CPU/memory to playback.
I'd recommend Handbrake (
http://handbrake.fr/) you can very easily push through DVD files or other files (like larger MP4) and convert them into smaller MP4s (I said so many times I'll write a post on that, I just won't promise anymore, but it's dead simple). If you want really good quality, use double pass conversion (it goes through the data to decide where to allocate more data to high speed transition frames or detailed frames for a better overall result).
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2012 10:36 pm
by BuZz
I tend to use ffmpegs mpeg4 codec rather than xvid, as you have better control over the maximum bitrate.
something like
Code: Select all
ffmpeg -i some_1080p_h264_video.mkv -scodec copy -acodec copy -vcodec mpeg4 -b:v 3000k -maxrate 5000k -bufsize 4096k -s 1280x720 -f matroska -y outfile.mkv
by using mkv as destination, we can copy across the embedded subtitles, and audio as is also. the max bitrate might need to be adjusted if you are not using passthrough over spdif for audio decoding etc.
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2012 10:53 pm
by DemonLady
No, i mean, video on true 1280x720 look SOOO much better than any other res scaled to 720p on my plasma HDTV.
i have a 500GB SATA drive so no space issues anymore, and MPEG2 playback is so smooth, no hiccups, no freezes, no nothing.
and Dan, i was talking about size on disk no image size.
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2012 11:25 pm
by BuZz
with the info I have given you can get excellent 1280x720 playback, and it will look better than mpeg2 video, as well as using up less disk space and preserving the original dts/ac3 audio etc.
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2012 3:28 pm
by DemonLady
so, can i replace "some_1080p_h264_video.mkv" with another extension?
and what i need to have installed, aside of ffmpeg ?
update:
windows cli is not as fun as linux shell, in fact is a pain.
i gonna try on linux.
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2012 8:41 pm
by BuZz
that would be any "infile". it can be any format ffmpeg can handle. most common would be to transcode a h264 1080p/720p video in matroska container.
just need ffmpeg installed. on windows/linux etc
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Thu Nov 22, 2012 3:48 am
by DemonLady
BuZz wrote:that would be any "infile". it can be any format ffmpeg can handle. most common would be to transcode a h264 1080p/720p video in matroska container.
just need ffmpeg installed. on windows/linux etc
oh my god... what kind of witchcraft is this? smooth playback and smaller size on disk? surely is a nice trick.
some frame drops at the begining of the video but other than that...just perfect.
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Sun Nov 25, 2012 11:43 pm
by Kozz
Yeah I just used it to convert a 640x480 video that was taken with a coolpix cam, file was 857mb and this shrunk it way down to 47MB !!!
The only problem for me is that it's really blocky/pixely if you know what I mean, I think its cause the source file is 640x480 avi and your command is best for reducing higher resolution. Here's what I've used maybe you can tell me the params I need to change to bump the image quality up just a little
Do I just need to add the -q flag to the output cmd?
Code: Select all
ffmpeg -i xbmc4xboxsetup.avi -r 30 -scodec copy -acodec copy -vcodec mpeg4 -b:v 3000k -maxrate 5000k -bufsize 4096k -s 640x480 -f matroska -y xbmc4xboxsetup.mkv
ffmpeg version 0.8.4-4:0.8.4-0ubuntu0.12.04.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2012 the Libav developers
built on Nov 6 2012 16:51:33 with gcc 4.6.3
*** THIS PROGRAM IS DEPRECATED ***
This program is only provided for compatibility and will be removed in a future release. Please use avconv instead.
[avi @ 0x19ea7a0] sample size (1) != block align (2)
Input #0, avi, from 'xbmc4xboxsetup.avi':
Metadata:
encoder :
maker : NIKON
model : S570
creation_time : 2009-01-01 00:00:00
Duration: 00:11:10.92, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 10944 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Video: mjpeg, yuvj422p, 640x480, 30 tbr, 30 tbn, 30 tbc
Stream #0.1: Audio: pcm_s16le, 16000 Hz, 1 channels, s16, 256 kb/s
Incompatible pixel format 'yuvj422p' for codec 'mpeg4', auto-selecting format 'yuv420p'
[buffer @ 0x19efea0] w:640 h:480 pixfmt:yuvj422p
[avsink @ 0x19ee860] auto-inserting filter 'auto-inserted scaler 0' between the filter 'src' and the filter 'out'
[scale @ 0x19f1f40] w:640 h:480 fmt:yuvj422p -> w:640 h:480 fmt:yuv420p flags:0x4
Output #0, matroska, to 'xbmc4xboxsetup.mkv':
Metadata:
creation_time : 2009-01-01 00:00:00
maker : NIKON
model : S570
encoder : Lavf53.21.0
Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 640x480, q=2-31, 200 kb/s, 1k tbn, 30 tbc
Stream #0.1: Audio: pcm_s16le, 16000 Hz, 1 channels, 256 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Stream #0.1 -> #0.1
Press ctrl-c to stop encoding
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2012 12:15 am
by BuZz
I'm not using libav, nor have I tested it with libav. libav has a new tool and ffmpeg command is deprecated (and is an old version with differing parameters). I am using ffmpeg from
http://www.ffmpeg.org (not the libav fork) - I recommend perhaps compiling from source or finding an ffmpeg build for debian/ubuntu else if you want to use libav you might need to change parameters around, and use their new commandline tool avconv.
personally I would just build latest ffmpeg from source and use that.
[edit] ffmpeg page has links to ubuntu ppa and debian builds.
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2012 12:31 am
by BuZz
BTW if you are unaware of the history of ffmpeg/libav this recent(ish) article covers a bunch of stuff
http://blog.pkh.me/p/13-the-ffmpeg-libav-situation.html
Re: 720p play and other stuff
Posted: Mon Nov 26, 2012 7:55 pm
by Kozz
Ahhh right that makes sense, I figured there might be an update when I seen the message about it being old and depreciated, I'll give that a go shortly here and post my findings