BD Ripper (3D Plus) Xbox Media Center Playback Solved!

[kdparton]

I've finally nailed this!! it has been a royal pain in the ass though

To cut a long story short, The Xbox360 can only support no more than FIVE reference frames ( I have absolutly no idea what a reference frame is!).

The Blu Ray Ripper default profile: "MKV.h264.ac3" is using the "x264_ABR_Fast.preset" which I believe is set to 16? reference frames.

There are other presets available which can be linked to each .xml profile but for some reason, when I create a custom profile it does not show up in DVDFAB for me to use so I have had to edit the default profile in notepad to point to a different preset:

1) opened up "bd_mkv.h264.ac3.xml" located in the profiles3 directory
2) browse to line: 31
3) edit the perset key to: <perset enable="0" key="x264_PS3_Xbox360_Fast.preset" owner="" template=""/>
4) save it.

The "x264_PS3_Xbox360_Fast.preset" has a level 3 setting on reference frames which allows the video to show.

All you need to install on your computer is:

1) Windows 7 OS
2) DivX 8 codec pack (makes use of the media splitter in windows 7 for native playback without transcoding)
3) ACfilter (to allow 5.1 or 7.1 playback...this may allow DTS to work but I have never used it)

thats it!

You'll have to play about with the video bitrate setting when using the ripper program, I have found values higher than 8000 can cause stutter when playing on the xbox 360.

Hope that helps someone!

[kdparton]

The Forum wont let me edit my post above so i'm having to post here.

I did miss a few things out above, my fault I guess..was too excited about actually getting this to work!

If you didn't know already, my post above was referring to MKV files with a H.264 video stream and AC3 sound.

I have found after many hours of encoding that AAC & DTS soundtracks end up with Sync problems using BD Ripper. Also, as many of you probably already know, the WMV profiles in DVDfab just dont work very well.

So using H.264 and AC3 in a MKV container work perfect.

Reference Frames

Anyways, I want to just expand a little on "Reference Frames" now i've looked at it a little more.

H.264 video uses a number of previous frames as reference to render future frames, which will allow the codec to compress video more efficently, increase quality and save space.

even though the codec can referance multiple frames, the previous frame is usually the best one as this is more likely to be the most accurate.

The default setting in DVDFAB is 16 frames..which is the maximum allowed within a H.264 stream.

The problem I was encountering with my MKV files, that I had ripped using DVDfab, was that they would play in Media Center on my Xbox but the screen would stay black, only the soundtrack could be heard.

This is due to the Xbox360 only being able to read a maximum of FIVE reference frames in a Video stream, anything more and it just ignores these frames, therefore not showing anything!

x264_PS3_Xbox360_Fast.preset

As far as I can tell, this preset has been set to 3 Reference Frames, so there may well be the flexability to increase this to 5 to better quality and slightly smaller file size but I have not tried it.