Compressing WTV

[sailracer]

Does anyone have a recommendation on how to compress WTV files?

I have tried transcoding them to MP4 using handbrake- It works great for playing on my HTPC/projector but they look awful on the XBox360 extender (looks heavily compressed). Is this because the XBox h.264 decoder sucks?

I tried MCEBuddy and ran with the WTV Compress setting and the resulting output won't play at all.

[lithium630]

Does anyone have a recommendation on how to compress WTV files?

I have tried transcoding them to MP4 using handbrake- It works great for playing on my HTPC/projector but they look awful on the XBox360 extender (looks heavily compressed). Is this because the XBox h.264 decoder sucks?

I tried MCEBuddy and ran with the WTV Compress setting and the resulting output won't play at all.

MP4's look fine on the Xbox. There is probably something wrong with the settings you are using. A good option is to use VideoRedo. Just open the WTV file and save it as WTV h264. The bonus is FF/RW will still work great.

[sailracer]

I ran a bunch of experiments creating different mp4 and mkv files from handbrake with a bunch of different setting adjustments and couldn't get any of them to look good on the Xbox.

$50 for Videoredo is a no-go. I'd rather put that money towards a new 3 or 4TB drive and not worry about compressing the WTV.

[lithium630]

I ran a bunch of experiments creating different mp4 and mkv files from handbrake with a bunch of different setting adjustments and couldn't get any of them to look good on the Xbox.

$50 for Videoredo is a no-go. I'd rather put that money towards a new 3 or 4TB drive and not worry about compressing the WTV.

What settings are you using?

[foxwood]

$50 for Videoredo is a no-go. I'd rather put that money towards a new 3 or 4TB drive and not worry about compressing the WTV.

The $50 version doesn't even support wtv. At this point, charging a premium for what should be basic functionality is a bit of a joke - and I don't like doing business with jokers, so they've lost at least one sale.

[choliscott]

What settings do you use to save as a WTV H264? I have tried saving as this & while the file size is smaller, I'm trying to see if I can get the file size even smaller while still having decent quality on the compression.

I ran a bunch of experiments creating different mp4 and mkv files from handbrake with a bunch of different setting adjustments and couldn't get any of them to look good on the Xbox.

$50 for Videoredo is a no-go. I'd rather put that money towards a new 3 or 4TB drive and not worry about compressing the WTV.

What settings are you using?

[lithium630]

What settings do you use to save as a WTV H264? I have tried saving as this & while the file size is smaller, I'm trying to see if I can get the file size even smaller while still having decent quality on the compression.

I ran a bunch of experiments creating different mp4 and mkv files from handbrake with a bunch of different setting adjustments and couldn't get any of them to look good on the Xbox.

$50 for Videoredo is a no-go. I'd rather put that money towards a new 3 or 4TB drive and not worry about compressing the WTV.

What settings are you using?

I use a bitrate of 10,000, dual pass, and ac3 320kbps for my blu-rays.

[sailracer]

I will need to check on the settings I used- I'm not in front of the computer with Handbrake on it and don't recall exactly. I think I tried checking each of the options on the video tab and adjusted the quality slider all the way up. I don't think I experimented with much on the advanced tab- I don't know what most of those options are tweaking.

I eventually used the AC3 passthrough setting for audio.

As I mentioned earlier, with most of the settings the quality of the resulting MP4 is very good when viewed on my computer or the attached 1080P projector w/ 110" screen. When viewed on a 52" LCD TV through the Xbox extender the picture has lots of macroblocking and compression artifacts. Playing the raw WTV file looks good on both systems.

I saw a brief comment on another forum that the Xbox doesn't do well with reference frames set to 3 (the Handbrake default) and recommended setting it down to 1.

Is the bitrate a concern only for h.264 video and not WTV (mpeg-2)? I don't recall using a constant bitrate in any of my settings and if I did I probably wouldn't have gone as low as 10000. (That's the Xbox specified limit, right?)

[foxwood]

That almost sounds as though the PC is transcoding that video before sending it to the XBox - can you check task Manager on the PC when this is happening, and see what CPU utilization is like?

[sailracer]

That almost sounds as though the PC is transcoding that video before sending it to the XBox - can you check task Manager on the PC when this is happening, and see what CPU utilization is like?

I will check this evening. That is an interesting thought. I just saw elsewhere that Xbox doesn't support 6 channel audio in MP4s, so could codecs be running on my PC and downconverting that to 2 channel before sending to the extender? (I have the K-lite codec pack installed). Could it be trying to do the same with h.264 video if it detects it has a higher bitrate than the Xbox can handle?

[sailracer]

That almost sounds as though the PC is transcoding that video before sending it to the XBox - can you check task Manager on the PC when this is happening, and see what CPU utilization is like?

I will check this evening. That is an interesting thought. I just saw elsewhere that Xbox doesn't support 6 channel audio in MP4s, so could codecs be running on my PC and downconverting that to 2 channel before sending to the extender? (I have the K-lite codec pack installed). Could it be trying to do the same with h.264 video if it detects it has a higher bitrate than the Xbox can handle?

Foxwood- I think you nailed it. My computer processor was running at about 20% when playing the MP4 on the Xbox and only running at 3% when playing the WTV. Now any ideas on how to avoid decoding/transcoding MP4s being sent to the Xbox? I'll try some experiments with turning the AC3 passthrough off and setting the bit rate lower as Lithium630 suggested.

[foxwood]

No, I don't have any suggestions, but at least you're now looking in the right place!

[lithium630]

I also turn on Detelecine and Decomb, and use a constant frame rate.

[sailracer]

I'm making some progress. I confirmed that using the AC3 passthru setting on Handbrake is causing the computer to attempt some sort of transcoding when extending to the Xbox and resulting in the bad video quality. Now, does anyone know if I encode the first audio track as an AAC mixdown, can I encode a second track as AC3 passthrough and select it on the computer? I'd really like to keep the 5.1 channel audio for playback on my computer in the theater but can live with a 2 channel mixdown on the Xbox extender.

Another question- do some shows, like those off HBO, have some DRM that prevents Handbrake from transcoding them? I haven't been able to get some of those shows to convert to MP4s.

[foxwood]

Another question- do some shows, like those off HBO, have some DRM that prevents Handbrake from transcoding them? I haven't been able to get some of those shows to convert to MP4s.

You can't do anything to any copy-protected files, such as those recorded from HBO. You can't even do automated commercial skipping, because the copy protected files can't even be read by programs that aren't PlayReady aware, never mind edited in any way.