Matroska anamorphic support on XBox?

[Beastie Boy]

I understand that the XBox with XBMP or XBMC installed can happily play MKV files. Does anyone know whether the aspect ratio feature of Matroska is also supported? I have some anamorphic files but don't yet have an XBox to test it, and I would like to know before I encode any more files.

Also, what would be the limit for playback on an XBox with regards to bitrate and frame size. I guess this would vary with different codecs and settings. Does anyone here have any experience of media playback on an XBox?

Many thanks in advance.

Cheers, Beastie.

[aaar9800]

I have tried all versions of XBMP and XBMC and none of them play MKV correctly or even play them at all...

[Atamido]

I had heard that originally Matroska worked fine on XBMP, but that it was broken in more recent builds.

Mon Sep 15 2003
<SeNsEi73> well i will try matroska support in xbmp 2.4
<SeNsEi73> damn didn't worked
<SeNsEi73> subtitle doesnt works :'(<SeNsEi73> i tried a sample video that worked
<SeNsEi73> but the one encode with these command " mkvmerge -o output.mkv input.avi input.srt" didn't worked

So, from that I would take that it would play a file without subtitles. I thought that XBMP used mplayer for its core?

[Beastie Boy]

Thanks for the replies.
None of my files include subtitles so I may be able to get them to play. XBMP/XBMC does indeed use MPlayer. The only player I know of that plays MKV files at the correct AR is TCMP, so I guess this may not work correctly on the XBox, unless support for the CDL can be introduced.

@aaar9800, what codec, bitrate and frame size do you use? I'm trying to get a feel for the playback capabilities of the XBox before buying one. The biggest drawback that I can see is that the DVD drive is crap.

Cheers, Beastie.

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by Beastie Boy The only player I know of that plays MKV files at the correct AR is TCMP, so I guess this may not work correctly on the XBox, unless support for the CDL can be introduced.

This is the list of players supporting matroska AR correction, and without the need to use ffdshow-alpha with 'use overlay' enabled ( this works with any DShow based player, and the latest matroska packs will even enable overlay in ffdshow during installation ) :

TCMP (http://corecoded.com) ; via CDL ; works with ANY codec

VLC (http://videolan.org) ; via libmatroska ; works with ANY codec that can be decoded by libavcodec

mplayer (http://mplayerhq.hu) ; via libmatroska ; works with ANY codec that can be decoded by libavcodec, plus some codecs supported via Windows DLLs

Zoomplayer (http://inmatrix.com) ; via Toff's track header interface in matroskasplitter ; works with ANY codec, DShow based

KoolPlaya (http://www.koolplaya.de) ; via Toff's track header interface in matroskasplitter ; works with ANY codec, DShow based

Gstreamer (http://www.gstreamer.net) ; using BBB's self made C-library for libmatroska/libebml, via Gstreamer internal AR handling, works also with any existing gst-plugin decoder

Hope this helps ....

[Beastie Boy]

Thanks for that Chris, I guess I'm a little behind with Matroska development. I'll search for 'libavcodec' and see which codecs are supported.

Cheers, Beastie.

[DigitalDeviant]

It also works on BSPlayer, at least the newest version (1.00 RC1 Duild 803.)I have a 720*480 RV9 clip theat resized to 4/3 without any problems.

[aaar9800]

Xbox can play pretty much any bitrate. If you are going to have some stuttering then you can always switch to libavcodec instead of xvid decoder. I never had any stuttering before i made a 704x576 rv9 clip, which is a real pain for xbox. other than that everything is playing fine. Xbox' drive is indeed crap - it only accepts cdrw and does not read that fast, thats why i use relax - xns server that will stream all the videos to the xbox and since my network is 100mbit, I can only get stuttering from slow preocessor, which is unusual.

I like playing 640x480 24fps 1300-1700kbps xvid material on my xbox with aac sound muxed into mp4. The results are quite nice.

Hope this helps

[SilverFaux]

@aaar9800: You can get rv9 to work with yours? Me and friend tried a few different things, and I couldn't get rv9 to play at all. Which player are you using, and which version?

I haven't tried .mkv with mine yet, but I haven't been doing any backups lately, and I'm too lazy to either burn the ones I already have to cd-rw, or try to make space for them on my hard-drive. :o
But I'm about to start the 2nd season of Family Guy, so I'll see how that works, and get back to you after I try the first one.

[aaar9800]

first you have to download win32 RV9 codecs form mplayerhq.hu:

http://ftp3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/

I am not sure if that link is legal and please remove it if it is.

Then unpack and put those files into xbmp/dll or xbmc/mplayer/codecs, depending on which program you use. Then make sure .rm and .rmvb is listed in the config.xml or XboxMediaCenter.xml

That works in XBMP CVS 10-29(however you have to rename .rmvb into .rm, since XBMP crashes when config.xml has .rmvb in a list of video extentions and you are trying to open a folder with .rmvb's in it) and in XBMC(anything above 11-17, .rmvb's are OK)

cook(R8A) doesn't work in xbmp for me for some reason, but does in xbmc.

I don't like builds above 11-29 for xbmc, since the sound gets these cracks in .mp4 and .ogm containers unless i press any button which enables time, subtitles: on/off or anything else on the screen.

[SilverFaux]

:thanks: for the help!

And I finished doing some of the family guy eps, and I found my xbox doesn't like .mkv either. Oh well... that's what I've got a computer for. :)

[aaar9800]

Try the XBMP 2.4 Point release, Matroska works there, but now that lacings are different, that splitter wouldn't work, so do not use lacing when muxing...

So, did RV9 work for you?

[SilverFaux]

Well, I've got rv9 working, at least somewhat. I haven't done a very thorough test yet, but it seems up and running using XBMC. We couldn't get it working with XBMP at all.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get .mkv muxed with rv9 to work, but I'm currently ftp'ing a test file using divx for the video instead.

Well, that's a no-go in either media player. They just don't like .mkv... I get broken audio from both players, but no video. One of the files I used for test was an older one I gave a friend that I know used the older lacing, and I disabled lacing in my new files, so that's not the problem. Oh well. My computer is my entertainment center anyway, with the xbox running into my all-in-wonder 9000, so it's not a big deal at the moment.