DivX� HD (High Definition) on XBMC

Filed under: nnxj.com — rose @ March 17, 2010 edit

divx hd homepage (http://www.divx.com/hd/)

for those of you with hd tv's and no hd content to play on them (impressive your friends with) check out divx's new 720p offering.

partial slow down in fast motion sequences however overall the playback is smooth and stunning to look at (superior to the equivalent 720p slide show you get with wm9) through xbmc.

the new divx 6 version will be able to encode 720p at 4mbps, instead of the standard 19mbps for mpeg-2 hd streams.

more information (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1750398,00.asp)

as this form of compression becomes more widely adopted, maybe there's some hope for future hd playback through xbmc using a standard xbox?

elupus, i will give this a go, but line 144 in what file?

as this form of compression becomes more widely adopted, maybe there's some hope for future hd playback through xbmc using a standard xbox?http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/info_faq.htm#hdtv a normal xbox doesn't have the cpu processing power to decode/render native hd video.

quote from bottom of http://www.divx.com/hd/ divx high definition playback requirements
since high definition video playback is processor intensive, you must meet the
following minimum system requirements to enjoy divx hd with the best experience.
2.4 ghz pc, 384 mb ram, 64 mb video ram

projectserberus.. that clip is now playing without a dropped frame using high q pixelshader.. looks like performance is back :)

thanks for the reply dingdong. i've been trying this on my work computer (which i've installed so many codecs and encoding apps on i'm not suprised i have problems frankly!). i'll give it a go on my pc at home with fresh installs of everything and see how things go.

yeah ... hdtv performance is back --- xbmc-cvs-2005-08-16-t3ch ---

@dingdong, have you had any luck with 5.1 sound included as well ?
i have stepped down to 1024x576 & ac3, which plays without framedrops. encoding in 1280x720 without ac3 is no problem, its just the sound that pushes it to the limit. :stare:

great thanks elupus! will test when i can next get a build.

this is due to the changes in the hq pixel renderer. to verify this, try the hw overlays.

anyways, it's being investigated.

for me the best performance for hd content has always been hardware overlays with disabled post processing.

hopefully by this time next year there will be plenty of hd movies on the market for us to experiment with.

i'm psyched. :kickass:

ac3+passthru uses more juice than mp3 decoding ?

thats illogical, but then again, stuff doesnt always make sense (especially not mplayer)

DivX and Xvid are both derivitives of H.263 (a.k.a. MPEG-4 ASP), see:
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/?title=XBMC_Features_and_Supported_Formats/Codecs#Supported_video_formats_and_resolutions
and:
http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/?title=What_is_XBMC_%26_What_Can_it_Do%3F#Does_XBM C_support_High_Definition_.28HD.29_resolution_medi a.3F

If you are thinking about H.264 (a.k.a. MPEG-4 AVC) then forget about it, you will never be able to playback native high-definition H.264 on the Xbox.

for some reason i see a gray line at the bottom of the video

i recently upgraded to the 8/10 build of xbmc and now my hd divx content, which previously played without a hitch is running choppy. (audio is fine, but video chops)

the king kong hd trailer is a good example:
http://www.dvdloc8.com/view_clip.php?movieid=7758#divx

in addition, other divx/xvids which looked really good with the previous version, now appear pixelated and blocky.

any ideas?

yes absolutly.. i have a few other ideas on how to speed it up, just surprised that it would have this affect.. could also result from the updated mplayer.dll.

if you wish to verify that it is the threaded renderer that is doing this (i would be happy if someone did). change line 144 wich reads
g_rendermanager.flippageasync();
to
g_rendermanager.flippage();

quite right vaeanu - if you want to buy a large screen now then there are only really hdtv's available, unless you want to save that $150 and buy a edtv.

obviously hdtv's support lower resolutions and xbmc has this excellent option to 'upscale to gui resolution' (http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/info_faq.htm#hdtv) which greatly improves the image quality of standard video (both dvd and rips) when used at 720p or 1080i.

the quality of hdtv is such that once you've seen it, looking at standard resolution (video) is like looking at a blurred image with washed out color depth!

another plus is that many films now going through a modern grading/ tele-cine pass (the coloring of the film) are being mastered to hd as well. the dvd is produced at this point (from a digital laser scan of the film - standard working resolution example being 2048x1556) so another step to producing a hd version is now a viable and affordable option. soon we will be re-buying indiana jones hd box set, star wars hd box set etc.

we wait for the hardware manufactures to decide upon a format and and for the distributors to start releasing their products using this format.

dvd is aging � role on hd :d

how do i set the sound and what was the codec u used? do u set the codecs in nandub or gordian knot? where do i set the birate?

yeah, same experience here with 2005-07-31, so i switched back to 2005-07-17

bakman:
i'm convinced you should really stick to singlepass-divx3.11 don't get me wrong - xvid is great - but it's results are too damn good in this case, let me explain what i mean.
a perfect codec reaches a very high compression and quality by spending extra bitrate in allready complex (->high bitrate) scenes, thats what 2ndpass is for. but for the xbox with it's limited capabilities there's only one focus - the bitrate maximum - it can handle. so you want a simple codec wich never exceeds the and wich doesnt make complex scenes even more complex. meaning it's less important to care about the average bitrate, instead trying to enforce a strict perframe bitrate maximum (nandub's low-pass filter).

thats why singlepass will do the job in this case, creating a file wich is a bit less in quality, but playable/'>playable and thats what counts - using xvid i was never able to keep frames from dropping.
so if you might wanna give nandub a try, the configuration parameters i mentioned can easyly be imported as a *.vcf file or setup by hand in sbc-settings. choosing 1280x720 as final resolution and cropping is all you need gordianknot for. save the *.avs file, open it with nandub, load the *.vcf, save avi - bingo (really that easy!). its just one encoding pass and the quality is still great.

one more... check your source is 25fps, cause even having xbmc skipping frames it still lacks the power needed to process 29.97fps(ntsc) without frames beginning to drop. to play ntsc you might want to adjust resolution or framerate and sound to 25fps if the slowness doesnt bother you.

simply use autogk, but dont forget to rename ts file as mpeg... easy as 2 clicks of a mouse...

for some reason i see a gray line at the bottom of the video

... try setting the allowed max bitrate to <= 6500kbps - that worked for me

cool, gonna snag the latest build i can find and give it a shot :) thanks for the help!

hehe yep support for subtitles have been added and working great. very nice thanks :)

this thread reminds me of the optimized build of mplayer decoder. those optimizations weren't they supposed to be able to be done to dvdplayer also so similar increase could be made there. 5-7% would mean alot I think

just wish to make sure you guys are not running with the sync interlaced video options, kinda doubting you are thou.

also, how is the low quality pixel shader faring?

for those of you with hd tv's and no hd content to play on them (impressive your friends with) check out divx's new 720p offering.
nice post, but why do you have no hdtv content? it's a lot of money to blow on a large tv. i live in tokyo so i get a bit of content on the satellite channels, but i end up watching a lot of normal tv too. at least that way you appreciate the massive quality improvement when you switch between the two.

Recently got a HDTV (720p) and I'd been worried about not finding an officialy MS HiDef pack. After reading a lot of threads it seems many people have had problems and I got the impression that I wouldn't be able to watch any 720p content. How wrong was I!

Took a chance on a cheapo component cable (�5 on ebay - gamersgear) and it works a treat - DVDs look great upscaled, And the GUI is stunning. XBMC just gets better and better.

Then, after reading the Wiki, I had a look round for some 1280*720 HDTV divx clips and found loads of trailers which nearly all played brilliantly. I know people have mentioned before that they've played divx HDTV content but I thought another voice saying it can be done wouldn't do any harm. I'm getting a HiDef PVR soon so hopefully can try encoding the odd full movie. Are there many out there already?

Anyway, just a big thanks to all the team who worked on XBMC - I truly love you all!

so why don't you try it? dvdplayer has supported srt subtitles for a while now :)

great thanks elupus! will test when i can next get a build.

... try setting the allowed max bitrate to <= 6500kbps - that worked for me
i wish i could :(

i am currently using a bitrate of 4000kbps in 1-pass. i don't really understand the configuration parameters you mentioned above. now i am using virtualdubmod with xvid, they play very well, but a higher resolution doesn't exactly hurt ;)

honestly i find gordian knot a bit complex, and i was not able to set a higher resolution than 800px wide ?

thanks for the comments dingdong. i'll switch back to that version for now. hopefully your observations can help iron out the problem.

has anyone noticed on the latest t3ch build (07/31) a drop in performance in regards to these files? i had 720p running like butter on a build from earlier this year, and had even started with experimenting with 1280x1080p with some promising results. i decided to update last night. now on all 720p divx or xvid i get huge framedrops across the board. *:(

Yes MPEG-4 ASP a H.263 derivative, see this "MPEG-4 Part 2" (a.k.a. MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile) article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_ASP

Here is a great article which also does a good job in explaining MPEG-4 ASP and the codecs available for it:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=73022

:rolleyes:

i tried versions 2005-07-24-, 07-31- and 2005-08-07-t3ch but all suffer from far too many dropped frames. when i use 2005-07-17-t3ch everything is fine.

-strangely, in order to return to no-framedrop-operation, it wasn't sufficient to just overwrite xbmc with the files from the old build but i had to restore 0face008 as well. meaning there's a specific setting staying in udata/tdata wich even hampers your old working version. hope these facts will help to locate the problem-

ps: lol, found it myself. it's neccessary to switch back to lq-pixel-shader wich i always use for maximum performance. but anyway, at the mom it seems 2005-07-17 remains to be the last version with zero drops

on2 vp6 ( and soon ) vp7 offer better quality with less cpu usage for rendering ... imho of course ... :saint:

compresses high-definition (hd) material with no restrictions on the encoder. vp6 can play back 1920x1080 hd material on a 2.5 ghz pc and 1280x720 material on a 1.5 ghz pc.

and this is with windows and his cpu time holes ... so on xbox, with the real cpu power ... i think on a 1.4ghz friend tech ...

and on xbox 2 ... :o

oh damn i see now you mean that has to be changed before compiling. i don't have the xdk unfortunately so can't test this out. if someone else could try this it would be most appreciated. in the meantime, i will test the build just prior to the threaded video renderer being added and post my feedback.

"I have a speciel HD profile on my boxes just for hd playback where everything not needed is disabled."

Dont suppose you fancy sharing your settings do you? still have varible results with HD....

what codecs? v6 ? no thats not out. if you're referring to divx hd, theres nothing "new" in that spec, its totally compatable with divx5, its just a higher resolution.

and upscaling to 1080i on my tv looks great except the odd breakup. have been thinking about using the pc as doing the hard work and getting the xbox to then display the output.. could be very cool if possible. i believe the dreambox (linux based satellite receiver) does this...

dreambox + pc + xbmc = hdheaven!

I just read through this entire thread... and I almost have an idea on getting HD video playback on the Xbox.

But since this thread is fairly old, I was wondering if there has been any improvements to the encoding techniques or if the currently XBMC builds can still achieve the same results relative to last year? Can different codecs be used yet? (Xvid, Divx 5?)

fta, search forum and wiki. it's all there

that would be xbmc\cores\mplayer\xbox_video.cpp line 144

when playing divx/xvid use the DVDPlayer instead of MPlayer (via white button and play using...). This gives much better results!
Also disable anything which can affect cpu use (stuff running in threads like fan control, rss, led rotation, ftp, web etc). also unplug any controller/ir dongle not used.
Digital output is really a must to avoid software decoding.

I have a speciel HD profile on my boxes just for hd playback where everything not needed is disabled.

thanks for the info pike.

i tried the hw overlays and playback was much better than the hq pixel renderer mode, but it still dropped many more frames than the last build i was using (from may this year). i'm thinking i may go back to that for now.

that always seems to be on the ts files. you must crop 8 pixels from the bottom to remove it.

@ dingdong:

i've been trying your method and am having trouble. when i choose save as avi i get a message saying 'you are trying to compress witha hacked compression driver. this may cause virtualdub to act or crash unexpectedly. proceed at you own risk.' if i tell it to continue anyway, sure enough the encode doesn't complete and the program crashes eventually. have you encountered this before?

On the encode side, I am having great success using the XVID "HDTV" profile with max b-vops=1 and target bitrate <=4800kbps. That xvid profile uses "video buffer verifier" parameters (must do 2-pass encode) that constrain the output stream to avoid spikes (with a small loss in quality) during 'hard' segments. This has pretty much eliminated frame drops for me (in conjunction with local hard disk playback, hardware overlay renderer, external digital audio decoder, etc) for 24fps material.

since my last 1080i testing session with cvs-2005-08-30-t3ch i tried following builds
cvs-2005-09-12-t3ch
cvs-2005-09-21-t3ch
cvs-2005-09-27-t3ch
cvs-2005-10-03-t3ch
cvs-2005-10-09-t3ch

...but none of them could reach the performance of build 08-30.
cause most (1280x720) video clips play just fine i'm testing with some really complex files. using the latest builds frames start dropping again at scenes where 08-30 didn't drop a single one (even with hq-pixel-shader) - so there seems to be a slight change in recent xbmc design !?

wow, great work... i'm just testing cvs_2005-08-30-t3ch wich seems to offer me the best hd-performance ever!
- 'ram managment' don't causes freezes anymore when playing around with the ftp & cache settings.
- playback from xbox hdd is perfect! 1280x720p test clips now play in full 1080i without any framedrops using hq-pixelshader, until now i always had to use 720p (no upsample to gui-res) and lq-shader.
- the network-playback performance increase is not as big. some video clips (wich had a few dropped frames before) now play smooth at 1080i and lq-shader, but sadly some other files seem to perform less (over lan) than before... hope this can be sorted out.

i'll keep on testing here... but it looks like the devs have allready found some great improvements - bravo.

ive downloaded several movies in 720p format in *.avi, however none of this movies play in my xbox. (i downloaded this movied from emule, torrent, etc.)

do you have idea??

the last experiment that im doing is to encodes wmvhd 1080i into divx hd 720p to see if i can see the movies.
you can forget about wmv hdtv clips/movies on xbox, not even microsoft thinks its possible

doesn't the gpu do a ton of the legwork in rendering images? i imagine that has something to do with xbmc's ability to play vids that are supposed to only work on much faster systems. that, and the fact that xbmc is less resource intensive base than win xp is. :thumbsup:

I really want subtitles in the dvd player prog now..

@elupus, could this issue be from the threaded renderer implementation?, can someone with divx hd files try the build date/day before and after that (see chnagelog.txt)

how do i set the sound and what was the codec u used? do u set the codecs in nandub or gordian knot? where do i set the birate?

elupus, i will give this a go, but line 144 in what file?

... try setting the allowed max bitrate to <= 6500kbps - that worked for me

okey, just commited some updates to the video renderers wich hopefully should improve this.

well... i have a question

i have seen several divx hd trailer using the xbmc, this trailers are in 720p (which my hdtv cant handle) my hdtv only handles 480p and 1080i so i supposed that xbmc is upgrading the divx hd trailer to 1080i (gui resolution).

ive downloaded several movies in 720p format in *.avi, however none of this movies play in my xbox. (i downloaded this movied from emule, torrent, etc.)

do you have idea??

the last experiment that im doing is to encodes wmvhd 1080i into divx hd 720p to see if i can see the movies.

no big deal , at least you posted about hd and not a completely different topic...

thanks for the comments dingdong. i'll switch back to that version for now. hopefully your observations can help iron out the problem.

i've tried lots of full length divx/xvid movies at 720p oar and most play without drops via dvdplayer decoder and lots with mplayer. downside seems only to be the lacking support for subtitles.
recently mplayer compilation was optimized with 5-7% speed gain. I hope the same will be done with dvdplayer which will result in pretty much no drops. a few drops are acceptable and often won't be noticed in the fast actions scenes where they usually occur

virtualdub.video.setdivx(6500,12);
see.. the (.vcf) file does everything for you. nandub uses divx3.11 (sbc settings) and for ac3 sound a bitrate of 6500 kbps is fine. converting the audio to mp3 (besweet 1.5) enables you to crank up the bitrate to aprox. 7000kbps (in this case set low-pass filter to 7100) before frames start dropping.
for more info take a look at doom9's sbc guide (http://www.doom9.org/sbc_main.htm).

now if someone write a tutorial on how to conver the ts hdtv files properly then we will be all set.
pretty simple stuff, it's just an mpeg2 stream.

head over to www.doom9.org for everything you could possiibly want to know about encoding to mpeg 4 from mpeg2.

yes those look great.

i cannot play in 720p on my tv, but tried in 1080i. they look incredible and similar to quality of hd content that i receive from satellite or cable. i also tried in 480p and they still look amazing.

i play them back on my pc also with latest xvid 1.03.

this is due to the changes in the hq pixel renderer. to verify this, try the hw overlays.

anyways, it's being investigated.

some points to note based on my experiments with a recent build of xbmc

1 global motion compensation works fine :kickass:
2 psychovisual enhancement works fine :bowdown:
3 bi directional multiple adaptive frames works fine :pirate:

as quarter pixel is disabled in the slow encode mode i have not tried quarter pixel. use slow encode mode instead, its better.

fusion is however all messed up - divx v6 beta. menus dont work and the sd playback of the divx fusion dirt bike demo resulted in major artificating and ended up crashing the system.

does anyone know if you can add deblocking and deringing to the codec for enhanced playback?? i dont see any parameters for that.

thanks :thumbsup:

Hey Ultrabrutal...when you said HD....which format you talking about Divx,Xivd MPEG4?

- demux with projectx 0.82.1.02
- create (.d2v) project file using dgindex 1.3.1b6
- create (.avs) avisynth script with gordian knot 0.35, choosing 1280x720 as final resolution
- open (.avs) file in nandub and load following processing settings (.vcf)
virtualdub.audio.setsource("c:\\xxxx");
virtualdub.audio.setmode(0);
virtualdub.audio.setinterleave(1,500,1,0,-900000);
virtualdub.audio.setclipmode(1,1);
virtualdub.audio.setconversion(0,0,0,0,0);
virtualdub.audio.setvolume();
virtualdub.audio.setcompression(85,48000,2,0,24000 ,1,12,"aqacaaaaqaibahef");
virtualdub.audio2.setsource(0);
virtualdub.video.setdepth(24,24);
virtualdub.video.setmode(1);
virtualdub.video.setframerate(0,1);
virtualdub.video.setivtc(0,0,-1,0);
virtualdub.video.setrange(0,0);
virtualdub.video.setdivx(6500,12);
virtualdub.video.setqualitycontrol(1,0,0,0);
virtualdub.video.setmotiondetection(8,10,300,300);
virtualdub.video.setcrispness(15,0);
virtualdub.video.spacekf(24);
virtualdub.video.internalscd(100);
virtualdub.video.setminkbps(500);
virtualdub.video.setcurvefile("");
virtualdub.video.setcurvemcfactor(30);
virtualdub.video.setcurvecompression(15,30,6);
virtualdub.video.setcurvefilter(300,6600);
virtualdub.video.setcurvecredits(0,900);
virtualdub.video.setlumacorrectionamp(1,10,30);
virtualdub.video.setcurveredist(1);
// virtualdub.video.calccurvecompression();
virtualdub.video.setcomplevelsmain(2,7);
virtualdub.video.setcomplevelsa(300,3,16);
virtualdub.video.setcomplevelsb(300,4,16);
virtualdub.video.setcomplevelsc(300,5,16);
virtualdub.video.setcomplevelsd(300,6,16);
virtualdub.video.setcomplevelse(300,7,16);
virtualdub.video.setcomplevelk(2,4);
virtualdub.video.setbitsreservoir(5,45,35,100,120, 0);
virtualdub.video.setlowbrcorrection(1,1);
virtualdub.video.noavioutput(0);
virtualdub.video.genstats("",0);
virtualdub.video.setencodingcontrol("");
virtualdub.video.filters.clear();
virtualdub.subset.delete();
virtualdub.brc.set( 0, 645 );
virtualdub.brc.set( 1, 1 );
virtualdub.brc.set( 2, 128 );
virtualdub.brc.set( 3, 0 );
virtualdub.brc.set( 4, 1 );

- save avi & that's about it ! if you choose adequate settings in xbmc, there should be almost no dropped frames during playback.

i tried a lot of encodings with xvid but singlepass with nandub gave me much better results, cause it avoids spending extra bits on already complex frames and there's a strict max. bitrate limit - making it playable/'>playable on xbox.
you can even play it in 1080i, if you choose the right xbmc settings/build/skin.

i use ffdshow for decoding on my 1ghz celeron laptop and it plays em ok (cpu is maxed) i think id downgrades the quality so it can actually play em though.

to conclude, i do believe the xbox and xbmc still can be used as a mini media center for years to come. well even after hdtv has been widely introduced...

@ diggedy:
never happend to me - as long as the source file is intact, so you may wanna check that you're able to encode regular mpeg. make sure that you have a new version of avisynth installed.
i never tested how nandub reacts to a (.vcf) file created by copy & paste, so maybe it helps to edit a genuine .vcf with the values i posted (sbc settings), but i think this isn't your problem.
the message is just the usual divx3.11 reminder, nothing wich hampers your encoding session. did you try doom9's forum for a solution ?

i was wondering how many xbmc users have been experimenting with the divx hd playback. the hd trailers on the divx site all seem to work really well (except for some dropped frames here and there) so i decided to do some experimenting with reencoding a .ts 1080i stream to this format.

my first attempt was downscaling the matrix to 720p using dr. divx at around 4500kbps and keeping the original ac3 to see how it went, and the results weren't so good. the encode looked great, but in playback there were just too many dropped frames to make it watchable, especially on the faster action scenes. these dropped frames seem to put the audio out of sync as well.

i'm now retrying the encode at a similar bitrate, but have dropped the resolution to 1024x576 to see how that plays. it won't look quite as sharp but i figure if it runs without dropped frames then it should still look quite nice.

i'd like to hear from you guys to see if any of you have tried anything similar. i recently bought a hd set and am after whatever i can get my grubby hands on to watch on it!

that would be xbmc\cores\mplayer\xbox_video.cpp line 144

hd rv10 sample trailers (including some anamorphic encodes):
http://dark.pluridis.org/trailers/

only tried the king arthur one. video's fine, but no audio, so i might be missing a .dll unless it's because of the container or something. i'll figure it out though :)

when time comes, one solution will be to compress hdtv, bluray (or whatever they call it) to divx in 720p and then burn it to a dvd-9 ;) that'll be a super dvd for xbox!

in addition, other divx/xvids which looked really good with the previous version, now appear pixelated and blocky. any ideas?make sure you disable post-processing and the deinterlace-filter! + use a build from 17 of aug or later and switch to lq-pixel-shader

The latest XBMC renderers are not as fast as they where a year ago, as they have been re-written to instead produce better picture quality (at the sacrifice of speed), which is great for standard-definition resolutions (up to DVD-Video specs of maximum 720x576), but is not good for high-definition at higher resolutions as they will drop more frames.

Yes you can use DivX and XviD (both are MPEG-4 ASP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4) codecs), both preform about the same at the same bit-rate and resolution, (quality can variate depending on the original source and the encoding process, like two-pass encoding with pre/post-processing during encoding). However, as far as I know the encoding technique/method that was used to encode a MPEG-4 ASP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4) (DivX/XviD) does not matter when it comes the decoding speed/time, (but bit-rate does play a rather big role though, as do the native resolution).

If you like to transcode high-definition videos (720p at 1280x720 progressive, or 1080i/1080p at 1920x1080 interlaced/progressive) then I recomend that you encode it to a lower resolution than 720p but a higher than 480p, like for example 960x540 a.k.a. HRHD (Half Resolution High Definition) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_Resolution_High_Definition). XBMC should be able to decode almost all 960x540 MPEG-4 ASP (DivX/XviD) video without dropping a frame, and XBMC will upscale that video and output it as 720p (or 1080i, but 720p is recomended) to your HDTV-display with great result. Also recomend you keep the original AC3 audio-track as it is and output it as pass-through AC3 to an external reciever/amplifier, (that what you won't wast any CPU-time on decoding the audio).

http://xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.php?title=Supported_File_Formats#Supported_v ideo_formats_and_resolutions

PS! OFF-TOPIC but just in case you are wondering we do not recommend encoding MPEG-4 AVC (H.264/x264) video for the Xbox, the Xbox 733Mhz Intel Pentium-III processor is just too slow, making it limited to decoding low resolutions (352x288) at low bit-rate, which don't look as good as MPEG-4 ASP (DivX/XviD) at 720x480 and higher resolutions and bit-rates.

http://xboxmediacenter.com/wiki/index.php?title=Appendix_B:_Troubleshooting#XBMC_a nd_the_Xbox_hardware_has_a_few_limitations.2C_plea se_read_this_for_more_information

sorry dumb question, but this hasn't been released yet has it? i went looking for dates or packages to pick up but haven't found much on when or where to pick up the codecs. are they included in the most recent divx pagackages at divx.com?

okey, just commited some updates to the video renderers wich hopefully should improve this.

i'm playing divx3.11-reencoded hd content at 1280x720p without any framedrops in perfect quality.
after quite a bit of testing it showed that i coudn't get smooth results with xvid. but using divx3.11 with nandub i discovered that single-pass encoding does the trick, cause it doesn't spend extra bits on already complex scenes.
do a few encodings and you'll see wich nandub settings work best for you and don't forget to tune xbmc for max speed.
for ac3 sound 6500kbps is fine, but using mp3-audio you can go up to a maximum of 7200kbps before the frames start to drop :)

regards

hehe, i thought i'd add hd realvideo so if anyone wanted to try it and compare. totally forgot that the topic was specifically referencing hd divx.

i concur that hd divx is quite good on the xbox via xbmc (prefer rv10 playing on xbox though :)). i'm sure i've seen some hd divx encodes at doom9, but their forum is down atm :(

I don't know about divx but I do know xvid will play back 720p just fine. Although high action scenes see it spike the cpu to 95-99%. It will sit as low as 80% cpu usage otherwise. So essentially 720p is the max it can do. If you used mpeg you might be able to get 1080p to display but I've never tried.

doesn't the gpu do a ton of the legwork in rendering images?no, no one coded that for xbmc/xbox (see http://www.xboxmediaplayer.de/cgi-bin....;t=2126 (http://www.xboxmediaplayer.de/cgi-bin/forums/ikonboard.pl?act=st;f=4;t=2126) *...maybe one day :rolleyes: ...it's a huge task because of the skills required)

a pc with an amd xp 2500+ doesnt even decode those well...
reencoding hd streams to divx or xvid 720p is the future for xbox :cool:

hmm.. no not really.. grab the new mplayer.dll from cvs and give that a shot and see if it improves anything. doubt it thou.

couple more trailers here (http://www.divxnetworks.com/solutions/hd/content.php)

absolutely vaeanu - the despite the system spec required for running, all these trailers run surprisingly well through xbmc. i'll be playing with autogk today � thanks for the heads up on this.

if you have a hd screen gamester please check these out as i don't think you'll be disappointed with the result.

my thinking may well be madness however might it be possible to use videolan to stream hd content (.wm9 and .ts) off a fast pc through xbmc?

streaming using videolan (standard video) (http://www.xboxmediaplayer.de/cgi-bin/forums/ikonboard.pl?act=st;f=8;t=4111)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.263

Uhh... h.263 isn't MPEG-4 ASP. :/

i'm really impressed how well xbmc handled ie the madagascar clip :) i tested both pixelshader and comborenderer and to my amazament combo was actually smoother!

here's one that have *hopes* we can play this smooth in the not too distant future

Hi,

i played a bit around with some hd samples i downloaded...
With the mplayer i lost many frames and it was far away from smooth, i tried the same hd sample with the dvdplayer and it was very smooth (ok still some loss of frames but always over 20fps)...
Is the dvdplayer optimized for encoding divx?

Btw. i use the latest t3ch build

bR
Wolfgang

Thank you for the help Ganster. Good to see everyone here in the community is friendly (I just made a lenghty PM to help a person myself). I will play around with the rendering options first, and see what happens than. If required, I will lower the resolution.

Perhaps we will get h.264 and x.264 working on XBMC 360!

just wish to make sure you guys are not running with the sync interlaced video options, kinda doubting you are thou.

also, how is the low quality pixel shader faring?

I know that XBMC cant play back HD content, but what if the HD content it is converted either on the fly or later on at the highest possible quality ivx format. I also know there have been great improvement ver the year in the divx quality...can anyone share his experiences on playing this formats...Thanks

... switched to hardware overlays a few months ago and had no more playback issues or a single dropped frame since. check your other playback settings i.e. lq-rendering - set everything to maximize speed, good luck

now if someone write a tutorial on how to conver the ts hdtv files properly then we will be all set.

i meant to ask the birate, and the resolution settings taht we should have. what will be the best result to play on a xbox. what will be the best codec to use. divx 3.11? divx 5? xvid?
should the guide from here work, still dont know the birate i should have
http://www.samek.neostrada.pl/hdtv/hdtv2xvid.htm

nice post, but why do you have no hdtv content? it's a lot of money to blow on a large tv.

if you wanna buy a flat screen now (lcd or plasma), it will be hdtv ready anyway. it doesnt mean i (an others on this thread) bought this kind of tv in order to watch hdtv content... there is so far only too few channels in hdtv in the states or in asia. the fact is that you can watch hdtv content on it... it doesnt mean you will. most people dont buy this kind of tv with that purpose!

elupus:
just tested cvs-2005-10-17-t3ch wich is supposed to include the new mplayer.dll, but the results are on the same disappointing level as the last 5 builds. the 5:27min (1280x720p) testclip produces 687 dropped frames when using lq-pixel-shader.
to remind you - cvs-2005-08-30 always plays the file without a single dropped frame in hq-pixel-shader mode - that's quite a significant difference.
amounts of free ram appear to be the same in both builds. any new ideas why the performance of cvs-08-30 is so much better, (when using pixel shaders) ?

bakman:
wow, you're right... switching to 'hardware overlays' makes the file playable/'>playable again (without drops) - long time ago since i tried this one - great tip, thx !

http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/info_faq.htm#hdtv a normal xbox doesn't have the cpu processing power to decode/render native hd video.

yes, but we are not talking native hdtv here. those samples are hdtv files encoded in 720p with divx. they are just divx with a higher resolution. they play pretty fine and thats kinda amazing actually!
by the way, you can achieve exactly the same results as the samples from the divx website by encoding a hdtv *.ts with autogk for instance...

as this form of compression becomes more widely adopted, maybe there's some hope for future hd playback through xbmc using a standard xbox?

i share this opinion as i did many tests with hdtv samples. even on heavy actions scene a 1080p reencoded to 720p plays extremely well on the xbox. and it looks better than dvd.
of course a cpu mod (dreamx) would make things even smoother but you partially lose the dvd capabilities of the xbox :no:

... i just like to add that it's important to equalize the 'low-pass' filter setting in nandub with your choosen bitrate, to enforce a strict maximum bitrate. this seems to be another key-feature.

#If you have any other info about this subject , Please add it free.#