Shaun wants to…

I own a Microsoft Xbox. I have Microsoft Windows on my PC. You would think getting the 2 to talk to each other nicely would be easy but I went through many a night of encoding, decoding, configuring and going to bed defeated before finally getting this craptastic process to work.

Here’s a quick summary of what I went through. First off, having a not so legit copy of Windows XP was certainly not a good place to start. This meant I couldn’t use the Zune Software or Windows Media Player 11 to share anything to my Xbox. I tried installing Tversity using this guide but couldn’t get it to work. I’m guessing that the Spring Xbox Dashboard update broke something with it. This was annoying so I decided I’d try using the legit 64bit version of XP I got from a Microsoft conference a while back. At the time when I got it I don’t think service pack 2 was out yet so it ran like shit as well a lot of vendors not having 64 bit drivers for it. All in all it was still an annoying experience having to install 64bit versions of some programs but not others but it did run a lot better. Having a legit copy of windows would now let me share movies to my Xbox with Zune or Windows Media Player 11. No wait a second, there’s no 64 bit version of the Zune software so it’d have to be with WMP. What? You can’t share mpeg4 files through WMP but you can with Zune? Well that’s great. Way to go billion dollar company. It is pretty amazing that the company that makes the 64bit version of the OS doesn’t also make all their programs 64bit compatible. Not to mention that the 64bit version wasn’t making encoding to WMV format any easier. Clearly this 64 bit version of windows didn’t help me at all.

I went back to my 32bit, non-genuine version of windows with the hopes that I could at least encode a movie that would play on my Xbox. I eventually got SUPER to produce a file that played on my Xbox. To transfer the file to my xbox I used a 128meg USB flash drive I had. After a good week of dicking around with all this crap I finally got it working. Instead of using SUPER now I just made a batch file that uses ffmpeg directly and I bought a 4gig USB flash drive yesterday to handle those longer movies and so I could encode things to very high quality.

Copy the following to a batch file, changing the path to your ffmpeg, then drag and drop any video to it and it will produce an mpeg4 file that works with your xbox. I made it so the command will start with low priority so that you can still use your computer while it encodes too.

START "I'M IN UR PUTER, ENCODIN' UR MOOVEEZ" /LOW "C:Program FileseRightSoftSUPERffmpeg" -i %1 -vcodec mpeg4 -b 2048 -r 24 -acodec aac -ab 96 "c:%~n1.mp4"