mp4 with 5.1 AAC audio not playing on xbox 360

[Paul]

No, FFmpeg does not support encoding WMA Pro, unfortunately.

[rkneeshaw]

Last one, how about an AVI container with MPEG part 2 (is this divx?) and dolby digital audio?

The Xbox 360 console supports the following for AVI:

* File extensions: .avi, .divx
* Containers: AVI
* Video profiles: MPEG-4 Part 2 (Simple Profile and Advanced Simple Profile)
* Video bit rate: 5 Mbps with resolutions of 1280 × 720 at 30 fps
* Audio profiles: Dolby® Digital (2 channel and 5.1 channel), MP3
* Audio max bit rate: No restrictions

[Paul]

I'll need to experiment with this - probably I'll have time on Monday and then I'll know for sure. As long as the XBox doesn't expect to find DivX tags in the AVI (which can only be put in after a file finishes transcoding), it may work.

[rkneeshaw]

It might be the last resort I hope it works out, I really really don't want to have to re-encode all of my movies..... wish ffmpeg would address the downsampling issue

Thanks for all your efforts!!!!

[rkneeshaw]

Looks like ffmpeg can do it, check this out:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1403042

[rkneeshaw]

I've given in and decided I'm going to re-encode all my video files. I had hoped that MP4 with h.264 video and AAC audio would be a good neutral format to store my movies/videos without compromising quality, but this isn't working so well for the big reason that both xbox and iPhones/iPads/etc do not support 5.1 channel AAC audio. So why bother re-encoding the audio anyway since almost EVERY device supports downmixing/decoding AC3 audio and its fairly efficient anyway. And the space savings is so negligible compared to AC3 that it doesnt really make sense to encode to 5.1 AAC... might as well leave it as 5.1 channel AC3 straight from the DVDs... the ultimate preservation of audio quality.

Also, since I'll likely have to transode everything on the fly anyway, I figure I might as well use the most flexible container and best formats possible: .MKV with h.264 video and AC3 audio.

I've used the device profile you provided earlier to force mezzmo to transocde to mp4/h264/aac and it works great. I took a MKV file with H.264 video and AC3 audio. Since xbox supports h264 in an mp4 container, Mezzmo is only converting the container and audio stream down to 2 channel AAC and leaving the video alone. This, IMO, is perfect and most efficient.

Now I just need to similarly check to make sure my iphone/ipod profiles are tweaked so the transcode output is mp4/h264/aac as well and I should be in a good spot.

[Paul]

Good, so now the XBox works properly?

The iPhone/iPod will not be able to play movies transcoded in real-time, but after they are transcoded they should work.

[rkneeshaw]

With a .mkv/h264/ac3 source file the xbox plays properly, and especially well using the updated device profile config you first posted that forces Mezzmo to transcode to mp4/h264/2-channel-aac. For the first time my encoded copy of "Cars" played on my xbox Apparently ffmpeg has no issue downmixing 5.1 channel ac3 to 2 channel AAC.

Thank you for the clarification on the iPhone/iPod transcoding; thats a bit of a bummer, hopefully Apple will update their software so real-time transcoded streams are possible, but thats probably a long shot.

[Paul]

The only way for Apple to fix this is to support something else, other than an MP4, because most other formats don't require special bits in the file to play. I agree, it's very unlikely to happen, unfortunately

[rkneeshaw]

So the limitation is with mp4?

Here's why I thought it was working on the xbox: I fired up Mezzmo on my underpowered pentium 4 1.8ghz server. I selected the mkv/h264/ac3 file from the xbox and the xbox paused, said "Opening" and sat there for about 20 to 30 seconds before I cancelled it. I walked away for about 10 minutes, came back, thought I'd try it again for good measure and it fired right up and played the movie. It only played about 5 minutes of the movie though. What I figure is that my server is way too underpowered to handle transcoding fast enough to keep up with real-time so it only transcoded 5 minutes of the movie so far and thats what I got. But maybe hte xbox would not have played it anyway, being that I have mezzmo configured to transcode to mp4, until the entire file was transcoded?

If thats the case then I'd rather upgrade my hardware and have it transcode to wmv.

I think I noticed that the xbox won't skip ahead when playing a wmv file, but it will when playing a mp4 file, is that a limitation of wmv or just the file I was playing?