Support for Nero AVC under XBMC...

[SaMe]

Hi all, few of you have already asked how to play the Nero Digital AVC encoded movies with the XBox MediaCenter... I've made a small guide on how to do this, upon the information I found on the XBMC forum. so...

DON'T THANK ME, BUT THANK THE GREAT GUYS FROM XBMC !!!

you can download the guide at http://www.geocities.com/s4m3y/XBMC....pport-SaMe.pdf

Happy coding

[bond]

of course this also means that .mp4 files created with x264 should be supported on xbmc and not only nerodigital ones

[SaMe]

indeed... i'm sorry i didn't mention that... I've tested Nero and x264; they work fine, although it seems there are some implementations of h.264 which lead to trouble when playing on xbmc...

[bond]

Originally Posted by SaMe

indeed... i'm sorry i didn't mention that... I've tested Nero and x264; they work fine, although it seems there are some implementations of h.264 which lead to trouble when playing on xbmc...

any more details? i assume the xbmc uses the ffmpeg avc decoder? so playing all avc streams supported by this decoder should work i guess?

[chilledoutuk]

fantastic guide mate the updated dll worked as treat will also be useful for adding support for other new codecs and formats that are added to mplayer.

For those of you who dont have the time here is the new xbmc mplayer.dll

as the guide says put this file in xbmcroot/system/players/mplayer replacing the old mplayer.dll

http://www.chilledoutuk.co.uk/mplayer.rar

[SkoalWintergreen]

Is everyone else having success with this .dll? My XBOX is on a network from my computer, but when I try to play a movie it moves real slow and stutters.

I have a 7-28 build of XBMC, and the movie is Lady Killers, encoded with Nero Digital, Standard AVC. The size of the movie was set at 1gb and it's 5.1 audio.

Just curious if anyone else has a stuttering problem and if it's related to the hardware or the network, but network is very fast (ALL XVIDS work perfectly!)

[SaMe]

the xbox hasn't got enough cpu power to seemlessly play a high-resolution avc encoded movie... (you can read the warning in the guide) if you used HE-AAC, move over to LC-AAC, then you spare the need of replicating audio by the SBR technology used in HE-AAC. But the xbox will never be able to play AVC files at full DVD resolution (width of 720p) I had to downsample to a width of about 592p (and my height was only 240p) before I could play files without any problems.

[SkoalWintergreen]

That seem weird that Xbox can't handle this AVC. Is the processing really that taxing? I have a P.O.S. 1089mhz AMD, flooded with Spyware, Porn, and probably 80 processes running at any given time, plus it's constantly overheating, and it has no problem running the movies I create with Nero AVC in the Nero Player. Before I got my laptop I tried to encode a nero AVC Max Def on this PC and it took 31 hours. Isn't XBOX 800 mhz with hardly any overhead? Just doesn't seem right. I feel like if the XBOX was using the Nero Digital Player it would be fine. AVC isn't that crazy is it?

[dejected_is_me]

i also have the stuttering problem. (i have been working with this for some time now) avc uses post processing when playing it back. ie cabrac and deblocking. Turning these off on the encode and basicaly every other option in the nero avc, Aside from the lower resolution, options makes it run ok at best. But you loose ALOT of quality. And it turns out much worst then say an xvid rip of the same material.
Also, even with the recomplied dll i still cant play x264 files. The xbox just crashes pittifully.

As for the XBOX its a 733 P3 with shared system and video ram. (this is problebly what kills the playback)

ive been thinking of building a small media center pc to replace the xbox. one of the main develpers in XBMC, frodo, has ventured into making a great pc program for this purpose called Media portal. goggle it.

[Cyberace]

Xbox CPU (and memory) can only handle lower bit-rate AVC too without dropping frames (= stutter) in XBMC, try bellow 1400kb/s video, LC-AAC or CBR-MP3 audio. Also disable post-processing and deinterlace in XBMC

[SkoalWintergreen]

I've thought about venturing into building a PVR or HTPC. That program looks pretty nice, but the question is can a HTPC that plays H.264 and has PVR functions be build for under 500?

[chilledoutuk]

i encoded wildthings with b frames turned off and 3 ref frames @ a resolution of 704x416 and a bitrate of 1000kbps and the video plays back smoothly. I find that bframes are just a bit too much to decode for the xbox.

this was with x264 i will try encoding some stuff with recode and see how that goes.

[Cyberace]

More hints and tips on H.264 playback in XBMC is available here:
http://www.xboxmediaplayer.de/cgi-bi...ST;f=8;t=13786

BTW, also make sure you enable the "LQ-Pixel-Shader " in XBMC!

PS! Very latest XBMC CVS has this new FFmpeg CVS integrated.

[SkoalWintergreen]

That should be interesting, I am at work, so can't download it and tested for another 7 hours, but if anyone does let me know.

[pgen]

Originally Posted by SkoalWintergreen

That should be interesting, I am at work, so can't download it and tested for another 7 hours, but if anyone does let me know.

works well but beware of high resolution and/or complexity, the XBOX has a small CPU !

[Backflip]

Ahh, so it's the B-frames that kills it. I'll have to give it another go with b-frames off

[yokem55]

Ahh, so it's the B-frames that kills it.

It actually appears to be the combination of a high resolution and b frames that is causing the problems. It might be worth it to figure out what is the best combination of resolution and b-frame settings that is playable on the xbox, especially if the bitrate isn't of serious concern (playing off the HD, not limited to cd sizes).

[SkoalWintergreen]

Yeah if anybody comes out with a good combination post it here, I'll do a couple attempts but a 2 hour movie for me takes a good 12 hours.

[four86]

what about the resolution of the videos? 720? or should I downsize it in NeroDigital

[Cyberace]

More tips here: http://www.xboxmediaplayer.de/cgi-bi...ST&f=2&t=14956

Originally Posted by Rabomil

I'm using the following 'rules' for my encodes, to remain Xbox compatible, without dropping frames:

- I encode movies with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio to the full dvd width of 720 pixels. (use 640 width, to be able to use anamorphic resolutions)

- I encode movies with a 16:9 aspect ratio to a width of 640 pixels (this is actually the maximum width of regular tv's). I do not use anamorphic resolutions, because that really hurts the performance of the Xbox and may cause frame drops. Besides that, there's no significant visual gain, compared to square pixel.

- I use six file sizes: 740 MB (1/6 part of a dvdr), 1480 MB (2/6 part of a dvdr), 2048 MB (maximum ISO file size), 2960 MB (4/6 part of a dvdr), 3700 MB (5/6 part of a dvdr) and 4440 MB (6/6 part of a dvdr). Most movies I encode have a size of 1480 MB or 2048 MB.

- The average video bitrate stays between 1.3mbit and 2 mbit (peaks to 5 mbit, maybe even higher, are possible without problems). The video bitrate appears not to be too important when it comes to compatibility with the Xbox.

- The average audio bitrate is either 384/448 kbit LC-AAC or 192/225/256 kbit HE-AAC. It depends on the videobitrate and the total file size whether I use LC- or HE-AAC.

- I use the standard AVC profile, with the default settings, except for the encoding options. There I only use bidirectional prediction (b-frames, 3 b-frames in a row max). It is possible to use macroblock partitions and weighted prediction, but I prefer not to use them all the time. CABAC and deblocking are hardly usable, because this will almost certainly cause frame drops. Other AVC profiles gave some artifacts on my Xbox (not on my pc) and do not offer options that prove to be really useful for the resolutions I use, quality wise.

You can find my Xbox Friendly H264 encodes on Usenet: alt.binaries.nerodigital

Compared to divx/xvid, H264/AVC is a huge step forward, even with the limitations, to remain Xbox compatible.

PS! Are there any C/C++ programmers out who like to improve XBMC/Xbox playback of H.264?:

If there is any developers out there who liuke to improve the smoothness of H.264 playback in XBMC then suggest you (port and) program/code and submit a patch for; fast h264 decoding (-lavdopts fast in mplayer for only H264/AVC), and/or libavcodec (FFmpeg) "skiploopfilter" decoding option. Those features should enable smoother playback of H264/AVC on the limited (CPU/RAM) resourses of the Xbox, (at the expense of a small quality loss that I think is worth paying, though again only for H264/AVC, ...for now). Alternativly if you are a very skilled C/C++ programmer (and maybe even have codec coding experinse) then you could help XBMC indirectly by improving FFmpeg and MPlayer with optimizing for the x86 platform (tip; the Xbox has a Intel Pentium-III processor which support SSE, MMX and MMX2, ...in theory using SSE optimizations is fastest).

end-users could also help by lobbying C/C++ programmers to help the XBMC Project with this