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HELP!! -- XBOX 360 Streaming from a Media Server

post #1 of 17
4/21/09 at 9:32pm
Thread Starter 
I HOPE you guys can help me out here PLEASE!

I have built a Media Server and it is up and running fine. It has Vista Ultimate Installed (64 bit)

I also have Media Browser installed and it shows the cover art, posters, etc just fine. I do have Daemon Tools installed as well.

My XBOX 360 sees the server fine, has Media Browser in it just fine, shows all the DVD rips just fine but when I choose play it goes off to a black/blank screen and then after about 30 seconds it pops up with the "FINISHED" prompt and that is it. No movie, no video, no audio nothing.

I know it is me and I am missing something but for the life of me I cannot figure it out and my research so far is yielding no answer.

Any ideas??

Thanks in advance!

Greg

***EDIT - I should mention that all rips are in the dvr-ms format.
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post #2 of 17
4/22/09 at 5:14am
Better place to ask is here

http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php

What I would do is Test a few other formats starting with WMV.
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post #3 of 17
4/22/09 at 12:22pm
Thread Starter 
Anybody?
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post #4 of 17
4/22/09 at 1:49pm
the xbox won't play ripped dvds. you need to convert it to mpg or wmv or transcode it on the fly.
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post #5 of 17
4/22/09 at 2:33pm
are the rips large enough to have the movie? I have ripped a few things before and had them not rip correctly and leave just the first little bit but not the whole movie.

can you move one to the recorded tv file and see if it plays outside media browser?

I know that .vob files renamed .mpg do not play through media browser (at least for me) because of a transcoding issue.

Are you ripping using todvrms?
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post #6 of 17
4/22/09 at 7:55pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Derek K. View Post

the xbox won't play ripped dvds. you need to convert it to mpg or wmv or transcode it on the fly.

Well that's not what I had read before I did all of this so now I am confused.

Ripping a ts DVD now, we'll see what happens


Quote:
Originally Posted by hukt View Post

are the rips large enough to have the movie? I have ripped a few things before and had them not rip correctly and leave just the first little bit but not the whole movie.

can you move one to the recorded tv file and see if it plays outside media browser?

I know that .vob files renamed .mpg do not play through media browser (at least for me) because of a transcoding issue.

Are you ripping using todvrms?

Yep all 40 rips I have are large enough for a full movie (2-4gb).

Ripping them to dvr-ms with VideoRedo TV Suite

No luck getting them to work in the "Recorded TV" Folder. It does the same thing.

Greg
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post #7 of 17
4/22/09 at 8:01pm
Thread Starter 
Well ts rips won't work either it seems. Error is that it cannot transcode. I have transcode 360 installed so it should work.

Greg
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post #8 of 17
4/23/09 at 1:38am
Quote:
Originally Posted by GCS View Post

Well that's not what I had read before I did all of this so now I am confused.

Don't be. DVDs do not work.
There is some info on the green button about a long winded workaround. Something about creating symbolic links to all the files. Too much trouble for me. MKVs also do not work without transcoding.
MP4 upto 4Gb stereo, AVI or MKV work.
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post #9 of 17
4/23/09 at 8:45am
my plan right now is a bit convoluted but here it is. Be aware I barely know enough to be dangerous so this works for me but no guarantees about others.

Burn DVD in dvd structure to hard drive (this will be used by wife on HTPC with media browser)

Then use DVD shrink and write a single large .vob file to another folder and rename it to a .mpg. I have heard this does not work for all movies but so far so good for me (about 25 movies)

After this I load it into mymovies and it will play through the extender as an mpeg (no fastforward or anything). I have tried media browser but never could get transcode360 (or whatever it is) to work well for me, my movies has one built in or something.

This way wife's movies (bulk of them) she can watch just with normal features and so on on main htpc or her computer. I don't care about that so for my movies I strip down the extras and simply keep the basics. The other day though she wanted one of her movies through the extender so I ran it through dvd shrink quick (about 10 minutes) and threw it up on mymovies and it worked perfectly.

so I am happy with this for now but really there has to be a better way. It is silly to have two copies but I don't have that many movies to really be concerned right now.
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post #10 of 17
4/23/09 at 9:17am
Thread Starter 
Well this surely sucks.

My only option at this point is to go with Sage HD200s throughout the house (cost more money of course) as that work perfectly with my set up.

It also means I could have gone with WHS instead of Vista Ultimate and gained more features (aka home backups etc) and run this as a true server.

Damn XBOX messed up my plans!

**EDIT - I fiddled with My Movies in the beginning (test machine) and worked with the 360 just fine as you said but MB is a lot better IMHO.

I guess I could look into making everything -ts and try to get MB and Transcode 360 to play nice. I would be able to still use the 360s at this point but would have to have the server do the work. I was trying to avoid this part but I should have plenty of CPU power (e8400 and 4gb of DDR3 ram) to handle it.

Greg
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post #11 of 17
4/23/09 at 10:57am
Quote:
Originally Posted by hukt View Post

my plan right now is a bit convoluted but here it is. Be aware I barely know enough to be dangerous so this works for me but no guarantees about others.

Burn DVD in dvd structure to hard drive (this will be used by wife on HTPC with media browser)

Then use DVD shrink and write a single large .vob file to another folder and rename it to a .mpg. I have heard this does not work for all movies but so far so good for me (about 25 movies)

After this I load it into mymovies and it will play through the extender as an mpeg (no fastforward or anything). I have tried media browser but never could get transcode360 (or whatever it is) to work well for me, my movies has one built in or something.

This way wife's movies (bulk of them) she can watch just with normal features and so on on main htpc or her computer. I don't care about that so for my movies I strip down the extras and simply keep the basics. The other day though she wanted one of her movies through the extender so I ran it through dvd shrink quick (about 10 minutes) and threw it up on mymovies and it worked perfectly.

so I am happy with this for now but really there has to be a better way. It is silly to have two copies but I don't have that many movies to really be concerned right now.

I do the same thing, only I use a little program called vob2mpg to convert the rip. I have only had an issue with 1 movie not playing correctly. the downside is each movie now takes up double the disk space.
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post #12 of 17
4/23/09 at 12:24pm
and here I thought surely I was the only one doing that I have used the vob2mpg before also but had shrink on the drive already but I should put both on incase one fails or something. Thanks
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post #13 of 17
4/27/09 at 5:48pm
This is what I do for my xbox 360 jukebox:

1. Rip DVD to hard drive with DVD Decrypter. This has worked with 90% of my movies.
2. Load the ripped DVD files into DVD Shrink. Reauthor, choosing just the main movie. Keep the 5.1 AC3 audio track and the subtitles if you want them*. Unselect the preferences option to split into 1GB chunks so the resulting VOB is one big file.
3. Load the VOB into AutoGK. In my experience, the Xbox 360 won't play avi's larger than 2GB very well so I set a size limit of 2000 MB (~1.95 GB). If the resulting file is less than 2000 MB I'll run the encoding again, this time with a 100% quality constraint.
4. Ta da! An avi file with decent video quality and 5.1 sound. It will play through the xbox dashboard using windows media player, tversity, etc (or connect360 on a mac). I use an external hard disk connected to the xbox's usb port. This lets you also include the movie poster.

* The Xbox 360 won't play external subtitles so you need to hard code them in. You can do this in AutoGK, but first you need to create a srt file using SubRip.
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post #14 of 17
4/27/09 at 10:22pm
another option....

http://tversity.com/
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post #15 of 17
5/27/09 at 5:05pm
Seems like a lot of monkey work to stream to the Xbox 360. So I'll chime in with what I do... and there is no conversion necessary. The xbox will play mpg files... and if you create a link to a vob

My movie structure for a simple movie is:
d:\\My Movies\\Wanted

0. Do the registry trick to enable the DVD Gallery
1. Rip DVD to hard drive (I use DVDShrink) as a single Vob file in the VIDEO_TS folder
2. Copy attached file to D:\\My Movies. Open a Command Prompt (if running Vista, open my right-clicking and choosing Run as Administrator)
3. Execute command cscript HardLink.vbs .
4. A new folder will get created called D:\\My Movies\\Wanted\\VIDEO_TS\\Extender-MyMovies
5. Inside the folder is a hard link to the vob file, and a playlist file. The link is titled *.MPG... but it is just a link of several bytes and not several GB.
6. Select the movie from the Xbox 360 Media Center via the DVD Gallery, and hit play. Works fine for me. Only thing is I cannot get the metadata to show up on the 360, but it does show up on the Vista HTPC. I use My Movies plugin for metadata.

-T

 

HardLink.zip 2.2841796875k . file
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post #16 of 17
5/27/09 at 5:16pm
Use windows 7 32 bit and all your issues go away.. I even stream my MKVs with FLAC audio.. And yes its supports DVD structure from Media browswer.. you will need to use DVD shrink to remove all the junk.. I prefer single VOB file also..

You ask why does this work with Windows 7 - Windows 7 has a transcodinig feature that actually works!

So far I can not get it working properly under Windows 7 64 bit..
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post #17 of 17
6/4/09 at 5:46pm
Just to contribute another option:

I use my XBox 360 with Media Center (I have XP 2005 MC on my laptop) and all of my files are DVR-MS files ripped from DVDs and converted with VideoRedo. I mostly use it for TV Series on DVD (for movies I use a dedicated Blu-ray player).

Normally I use DVD43 to decrypt the disc and DVD Shrink (with no compression) to pull off the VOB files (no split at 1GB). Then I use VideoRedo's batch tool to convert the VOBs to DVR-MS (keeping the original MPEG-2 video with no re-encode)

With DVR-MS I get full FF/RWD support, full DVD video quality, and full 5.1 Dolby Digital audio, it works great! I can play them from "My Videos" but I normally use the My Movies plug-in for a nicer user interface.
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