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Re: Win7, MKV, Xbox 360 and AC3/DTS...

jhoff80 — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:45:44 GMT

Ahh, that explains a lot. I'm using the Haali x64 splitter and FFDshow.

Are you able to switch between multiple audio tracks and subtitle tracks using the Divx splitter and MediaFoundation yet? That's the main reason I switched to FFDshow, so that I could use the MediaControl plugin.

Re: Win7, MKV, Xbox 360 and AC3/DTS...

admin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:14:55 GMT

As I understand it (and I haven't invested a lot of time looking into it) we will need Media Foundation codecs/splitters for this to work. That's not to say we have to use the existing Win7 codecs though, there is already some work being done by [some of] the FFDShow devs to come up with something.

Going the MF route should also allow for DXVA playback with subs/overlays.

Re: Win7, MKV, Xbox 360 and AC3/DTS...

dgaust — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:51:39 GMT

Yeah sorry, I meant for xbox360 streaming.... I've had mkvs working on my Win7 build for a while now... I've actually disabled all the media foundation codecs on my system. ffdshow with upscaling/sharpening etc work so much better than the media foundation ones.

Re: Win7, MKV, Xbox 360 and AC3/DTS...

admin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:26:11 GMT

Seems to work with all I've tried (Haali, Divx and another one I cannot remember the name of), however it's only the Divx one that will do [Xbox 360] streaming due to it's Media Foundation building blocks.

Re: Win7, MKV, Xbox 360 and AC3/DTS...

dgaust — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:19:34 GMT

Do mkvs now work with all mkv splitters? Or is it still only the divx one?

Re: Win7, MKV, Xbox 360 and AC3/DTS...

admin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:42 GMT

Oh well, perhaps I'll just try it out myself, it's just a pain re-connecting the Xbox to different Media Centers all the time :) and I'm a bit uneasy about doing it as it will upgrade the Xbox 360 extender software, something I'm uncertain is temporary or not and I must have the ability to roll-back should W7 not be up to the job.

For the native transcoding, that's what I was led to believe initially, however it seems it will only transcode the stream(s) if needed. Since the Xbox 360 can handle VC1 (h.264) streams natively you get the full HD experience. This is why it's relatively quick and simple to convert [certain] MKVs to a container the 360 understands with no loss of quality.

Re: Win7, MKV, Xbox 360 and AC3/DTS...

jhoff80 — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:26:14 GMT

I haven't been able to get DTS streaming working to the extender. That being said, I admittedly haven't spent too much time on it because my 360 and HTPC are in the same room anyway.

And for the record, from what I understand it does get transcoded to be sent to the 360, it's just that Windows 7 does it natively now.

Win7, MKV, Xbox 360 and AC3/DTS...

admin — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 23:56:49 GMT

Sooo, now that we no longer have to transcode H264 material for playback on the 360 what do we do to get full fidelity audio?

I'm guessing AC3 streams shouldn't be a problem? But what about DTS streams? I've seen reports that these get downsampled to 2 channel PCM which is less than ideal, any workarounds at all (other than running my own implementation of mencoder which converts DTS to AC3)?

Is anyone running Win7 and an Xbox 360 for playback of H264 & AC3/DTS in MKV containers currently? What's your experience? This might be the kick I need to finally shift my Media Center VM to Win7.