Xbox 360 & AVCHD

Not natively, you would have to author your footage to an HD-DVD compatible format. AVCHD is basically a Blu-Ray format file.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=999860

I can confirm that it does NOT support it.

I also can confirm that you can't burn a HD-DVD data on a DVD-/+R disk and use the 360 HD-DVD add-on to play it (it only supports real HD-DVDs). I gather that if you had a HD-DVD burner, you could author one and play it on, but I can't confirm that either, since I don't have a burner and I surely won't be purchasing one now.

Unsure. The PowerDVD "Bluray" edition plays them beautifully. But I'm not sure if it's got the right things to playback AVCHD. On thing to try if you have it is to try opening m2ts files with it to see. Either way, it won't support 5.1 natively (it's limited to DD2.0), so the PC version would give you a better experience, as well as supporting HDDVD and bluray playback as well.

This is not true.

While it is true that the Xbox does not play your standard home burned HD DVD (on dvd-r), there are programs that have a "burn for xbox compatibility" switch... which of course must be activated if you plan on using the disk for the xbox

Care to share which programs support that? Have you tried it? When I got my Pinnacle Plus 11.1, which supports authoring of HD-DVDs, there was a little piece of paper clearly stating that the HD-DVD add-on did not support HD-DVD authored on DVD+/-R mediums. You may be able to burn a DVD an play it in the main XBox drive. You may even be able to stream AVCHD data via MCE to it (I don't know if it works right now, but it's a possibility). But to my knowledge, you can't author a HD-DVD on a DVD+/-R medium and get the add-in HDDVD player to recognize it. Note that there's no way to run the HDDVD software player on the 360 from the main drive either.

[EDIT]
Boy was I wrong or what!

My apologies bigbarney, you were right and I was wrong! And boy I love to be wrong in this case!

I just burned a HD-DVD on a DVD+R using Pinnacle, popped it in my add-on HD-DVD player and lo and behold it started playing my movie in Hi-Def on the XBox. I also popped it back in my PC and can confirm that the disk is considered an HD-DVD and can be played using PowerDVD 7 bluray edition (which probably means that it supports both).

Note that Pinnacle recompresses the video stream into MPEG-2 25Mbps when authoring HD-DVDs. I haven't found a way to keep the H.264 intact.

Again sorry I was incredulous on this. I was misinformed regarding the drive and its capabilities.
[/EDIT]

ericjut- Would you mind clarifying what you did here? Did you use a blank HD-DVD disk in a DVD+R burner and burn the AVCHD files and play on your xbox 360 add on HD DVD player? Or, was it a blank DVD+R disk in a HD-DVD burner and you burned mpeg 2 files? Maybe it would be good to describe the exact steps you took to get the AVCHD files to burn on a disk and play on the xbox360 HD-DVD player.

In another forum, I got into a discussion with a fellow who insisted he was able to burn AVCHD files to a "disk" and play on his xbox360 as well as other HD-DVD players but it turned out all he was doing was shooting the video with an AVCHD camcorder (SR10) then with software, converting to mpeg 2 and burning to a $20 HD-DVD blank which played fine. I understand that since it was essentially an HD-DVD, not what we were intending to do which was put AVCHD files on a 4.7Gb DVD-r and have it play, like the Blue Ray player will, in a xbox360 HD DVD player.

Here's what I did in Pinnacle Plus 11:
- I imported my M2TS files on the timeline.
- In the "Make Move" tab, I selected "HD-DVD" disk type with automatic quality (which is going to encode the disk in 25Mbps MPEG-2).
- I put a 4.7GB DVD+R in my burner.
- I then pressed the "Create Disk" button.

This created an HD-DVD compatible disk using a $0.10 DVD+R medium, which can hold up to 24 minutes. It took about 40 minutes to encode 20 minutes of content on my PC.

I then put the disk in my 360 HD-DVD add-on drive and it played.

I tried the 360 build in drive and it didn't work (looks like it supports disk with HD-DVD layout only in the addon drive).

I then tried it in PowerDVD bluray edition on my PC, and the player was able to playback the disk.

I then finally tried the disk on my standalone HD-DVD player (D-A3) and it worked too (expected).

In other words, you can author HD-DVD layouts on a DVD+R disk and get it to play on the 360 with the add-on HD-DVD drive, which is something I was told was not possible.

While the 360 HD-DVD software can decode H.264, AC3, and possibly even the MPEG2 transport-stream container, I don't think the software is able to deal with the AVCHD disk layout, which is very similar to bluray (it didn't work when I tried to author an AVCHD disk from Pinnacle anyway).

Can anyone confirm that this method has also worked for them? If so there may be life for HD-DVD yet. My brother just got a HD Camcorder and I'd like to be able to backup and view some of the footage he's been recording on an HDTV

Also, can anyone confirm whether this is possible using Nero 8, and if so, how one does it? Most of my morning gone to trying to figure this out...

While we're at it, is it possible to stream HD video captured with my HD camcorder (canon hg10) from my PC to my xbox360, or is burning to cd the only way to use xbox to view hd video?

If all you want to do is watch it on your Xbox 360, then why are you burning anything?

You can stream the video directly to the Xbox from your PC with Windows Media Player 11 (Add the Xbox360 as a media extender).

OR... just put the video files on a USB stick and plug it in to the Xbox and play the video from the USB stick. The Xbox supports h.264 mov files if you do it this way.

/SmokeSignal

No problem.

We went through this in studio 10, which was not possible at the time. Avid (which owns Pinnacle) had a chat with Microsoft and they got things ironed out.

I *think* Ulead also now has xbox 360 compatibility now.

Well, the Xbox doesn't see the videos in M2TS format, so I guess I need to convert them to another format, correct? How to do this, and what format? (Happy to avoid burning completely.)

Pretty sure that the Xbox can support most formats now. AVI/WMV/XVID/DIVX. For HD my favorite is H.264. I download a decent amount of podcasts that are .mov files but encoded in h.264. These work too.

I'm fairly certain the most video editing suites must allow h.264 exporting by now.

H.264 is the encoding method, not the container (aka file format). In your case, your H.264 content is contained within a QuickTime MOV file (which I'm surprised to hear it works but what the heck!). AVCHD M2TS file format has H.264 video in it, but it's using an MPEG-2 Transport Stream as the container, which I don't think the 360 supports. That's most probably why it's not working.

I have a Panasonic HDC-SD9. I can play the .mts files it creates on the PS3. However, I do not own a PS3 and would like to play these files on my Xbox 360 either over a network or with a USB drive.

Is it possible to have the xbox recognize the the files without converting them?

If they need to be converted, what's the best way to convert them without losing quality?

I use Sony Vegas Pro, to convert AVCHD to High Def 1920x1080 AC3 WMV to play on XBOX. It takes forever on my Dual Core (10 min to render 1 min), so I bought a Quad Core this weekend, havent had a chance to play with the new machine yet. I also understand the MS Expression Encoder 2 can render AVCHD to WMV , see :

http://blogs.msdn.com/expressionenco...0/8590639.aspx

And if you setup the codecs properly, you can use the express version of Expression Encoder 2 to do this, which is free to use (but limits some of the functionality on the encode settings).

Hello Eric,

Can you confirm the AVCHD DVD you created doesn't work with internal XBOX DVD drive? That would be great but I'm afraid it may not be the case seeing the earlier response... Bummer... Hopefully we'll get a firmware update for AVCHD one of these days...

Quicktime and MP4 containers with H.264 are supported and it works fine but kind of a deal-breaker for me is the lack of 5.1 support.... I tried 5.1 anyway and yes it will give error unsupported:-(.

See here exact requirements: http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archi...yback-faq.aspx


I don't think you can stream AVCHD over mediaplayer to xbox 360 unless you use a 3rd party transcoder (I tried that and playback is not very smooth especially with a duo-core PC).

AVCHD DVDs don't work (at the least on mine). HD-DVDs on DVD media works.

Looks like VC-1 files should be working with 5.1 from that page you sent us. That's good news.

Yes I use that all the time for movies (which still look great even downcompressed to 4GB size but you could also stream).

Here's an old blog entry ('07 August) about converting TS/MKV to WMVHD with surround (needs AVS otherwise audio gets out of sync):

http://lucienk.spaces.live.com/blog/...6635!317.entry

crussell1492 -

Thanks for the info. Please post an update on how the quad core performs. Playback on my dual core 2ghz, 2gig of ram, crappy video card, is VERY choppy. I don't attempt to edit. I'm researching a new machine, but it's still a few months out.

I was hoping to use the xbox to at least be able to watch the videos in HD without going through a cumbersome process.

I'm currently storing my video on the web... if anyone has any suggestions on storage practices, please suggest, i'm new. I'm hoping to be able to stream this someday...


www"DOT"customrevit.com/Video/

I want to keep the file structure, right?

FYI...

Playback is greatly helped by having a decent video card and software that uses it.

Transcoding benefits from having more memory and better faster CPU(s), not so much from a better video card.

AVCHD DVDs I created with Ulead VS work fine on my Xbox 360 HD-DVD unit.

FYI..

Troy

took me awhile to get back
I used Sony Vegas Pro to render AVCHD to WMV so that I can stream on my XBOX
I render using CBR Dual Pass Video, and 384k 5.1 Audio
A 1:15 AVCHD File took 16:16 on my QuadCore Q6700 2.66 GHz, 4 GB RAM Vista 64-bit machine

Thanks for posting times, always very interesting to see how Quad performs. Strange is that with my duo-core 2.4GHz 2GB and Vista 32-bit I get about 1:20 ratio with 2 pass VBR. According to legitreviews quad should be about 2-4x faster than duo-core on average. Perhaps you added a lot of filters (or 2 pass CBR is a bit slower). Haven't tried 2 pass CBR yet (typically only use multi-pass with VBR but might be worth a try).

Here are settings I use with Vegas Pro for XBOX 360:

http://lucienk.spaces.live.com/blog/...6635!867.entry

I am doing 1920X1080, looks like you are doing 1280X720, doing 1920X1280 on my old Dual Core I was getting no where near what you are seeing doing 1280x720

thanks for posting your settings, very helpful
what bit rate is the AVCDH audio? I want to render the videos so that there is no audio loss, is 192k going to do that?

thank you

edit : I guess a better question I need to find the answer to is what bitrate does my Sony HDR SR-11record at?

Not every WMV transcoder is optimized for Quad+ cores. Most of them will max out only 2 of the core.

I know that Expression Encoder will max out 4 cores, and will utilize most of all cores one an 8 core PC while transcoding to WMV VC-1, but I've yet to see another encoder do that (I know Pinnacle Studio doesn't, and it looks like Vegas isn't either).

To verify, just open "Task Manager" and check the Performance tab after you start a transcoding job. If not all 4+ cores are at 90-100% or usage, that means the software you use isn't optimized for multi-cores to transcode WMV.