Xbox 360 attempting the impossible?

[henr0 0]

Hi,

Yesterday my kids were watching a movie that had previously played just fine but on that day it suffered from a problem that I generally have when streaming outside my home on low bandwidth connections - the video would take a pause every few minutes and then kick back in. Very frustrating to watch; it drove my dad bonkers - "Why don't you just put the DVD in?"

I have MB Server 3.0.5464.40000, MB Classic 3.0.328.0, and they were playing it on an XBOX 360.

 

So I took a look at the server and found something very odd - Even though the movie was encoded as a 10 Mbps 1920x1080 H.264 in a MKV container, it was playing "direct." Not transcoding. The Xbox seemed to be choking on the file.

 

After that movie we watched another that was encoded in a similar way but at a much lower bitrate. An mkv with an H.264 1916x796 / 4.254 Kbps. This file played OK with no stops but was still playing "direct."

 

My XBOX 360 never played MKV files directly before... Now - I just made alot of changes. These files are not stored on the MB Server they are on a NAS. I just moved them from a NAS that was serving them via SMB to a NAS that is attached to the server via an iSCSI link. So maybe the path substitution was not working properly before but now it is...

 

But I thought that the XBOX would need any MKV transcoded. I also thought the playback filters would prevent the XBOX 360 from trying to direct play any file too heavy for it?

 

Since the second movie worked, I stopped short of breaknig the path substitution to force transcoding. It WAS nice to have fast forward & rewind working in the 2nd movie, but it was not nice to watch the first movie while trying to avoid having a seizure.

 

Does this make sense on any level?

 

Thanks very much to all of the developers who work on this excellent project! Happy Holidays!

 

H

[Luke 40116]

the xbox 360 doesn't handle content over 10mbps very well, so yes, it should transcode. i'm not sure if media browser classic has a setting for this, or if it handles it internally. @@ebr can answer that.

[ebr 15672]

MBC does not attempt to do anything special to automatically transcode when on an extender.