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.
It's like communicating with god. You pray and pray and pray for that bike, but you never get a response or the bike.Then you figure out how it works; you steal a bike and pray for forgiveness.
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.
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.
Do mkvs now work with all mkv splitters? Or is it still only the divx one?
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.
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.
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.
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.
