MCE & DVD Ripping

aFlabbyPanda

I have most of my dvd's backed up to either divx, xvid or kept as stripped vob's. I have the divx streamer installed so the media extender (xbox 360) will play back the divx files. The problem is I cant fast forward or rewind with this method so I need to re-encode everything back to wmv or mpeg. But the ones I've tried so far dont do it either (they play fine with wmp but not MC)

anyone got any info on what the file needs to be to be fully supported under MCE?

8T8

MCE can only fast forward or rewind a wmv file when an index track is present in the video stream.

Why that is not created by whatever program you are using to the encoding I cannot say.

A method to get around that & not have to re-encode the file {though I confess have not verified it myself} is to use the "Windows Media File Editor" it can be found inside the "Windows Media Encoder 9 Series" package available here.

After running the program open the wmv file in question, then from the file menu select "Save and Index" that's all there should be to it.

aFlabbyPanda

what did you convert to wmv first? dvd, divx or what it just a wmv to begin with? also looking at other ways to get the wmv in the first place

8T8

My knowledge of what MCE requires for fast/forward rewind comes from looking into into the topic to see if it were possible with non-wmv media I'm afraid.

I have not experimented with wmv encoding in this particular area so I cannot say which program should generate the index track and which doesn't though I would have thought Windows Movie Maker which I assume the program your using to the job would have.

Perhaps WMM will only index wmv files imported into the program but I am merely speculating.

Try the program above I mentioned it should hopefully solve the problem either way.

If you are looking at alternate methods of encoding to wmv, if you really know your video stuff there is a nice GUI for the WM9 & VC-1 {beta} encoder if that is way too much go to this site in the column on the left hand side expand the save movies & click on custom wmv profiles.

That guy has custom video encoding profiles for WMM you simply drop them into the programs profile folder & away you go.


There is also a freeware program I forgot about called Movie Pro that converts to WMV plus AC3 5.1 that the Xbox 360 will play, alternatively if you don't want to convert to WMV this guide here will show you how to leave it as a single MPEG-2 file playable on the Xbox 360.

Sometime today if I can find a short clip from a DVD I'll give it a whirl through WMM with the PAL DVD profile from PapaJohns site as I have an Xbox 360 to test with & see if the resulting file is indexed so compatible with fast forward & rewind.

8T8

Okay just an update I managed to do some encoding tests today.

I used an episode of Seinfeld off it's DVD release and ran it through WMM and the resulting seinfeld.wmv file was properly indexed with fast forward & rewind working in MCE and through MCE on the Xbox 360.

So whatever application your using must not be indexing the videos so your best bet is the Windows Media File Editor program to manually add the index into each file.

SouperComputer

when you say index do you mean keyframes?

8T8

Yeah I guess thats what MS refers to it as, more here.

The file is indexed at each key frame

Encoding to wmv is a pain in the ass as from what I've experienced so far frankly I don't think its worth the hassle wait till the the VC-1 encoder gets better, it will retain more quality and is supported by the Xbox 360 but the encoder is still in a very rough shape at the moment. Plus there was also a crazy rumour of DivX support coming to the Xbox 360 soon but I doubt that still wait a another month or two before encoding your DVDs to wmv.

SouperComputer

feckin' M$ messin' with the system :rolleyes:

aFlabbyPanda

8T8 wrote:

Okay just an update I managed to do some encoding tests today.

I used an episode of Seinfeld off it's DVD release and ran it through WMM and the resulting seinfeld.wmv file was properly indexed with fast forward & rewind working in MCE and through MCE on the Xbox 360.

So whatever application your using must not be indexing the videos so your best bet is the Windows Media File Editor program to manually add the index into each file.

so what did you use to rip the dvd with? or did you just change the vob extension and then run it through the wmv converter.

I download the converter last night but it gives errors on most of my stuff so far. tbh I havent had the time to spend with it so I'll probably leave it there till thursday or so.

8T8

There is a problem with WMM and importing MPEG-2 content, WMM goes odd with some MPEG-2 decoders unfortunately mine is one of them (NVIDIA Purevideo) and I didn't want to change it.

FYI some do work as a good few months back while messing with WMM I had the same problem but managed to get WMM to use the .vob/.mpg file I think it may have been the Nero MPEG2 decoder ??

Anyway if you put the MPEG2 into an AVI container WMM will always work with it not matter what. I confess this was one area were my skills are rough and for the life of me could not find suitable guides towards re-encoding MPEG2 into an AVI container without the file size ballooning to a huge amount (like 31GB for an 1GB vob file).

What I did was use some frame serving trickery which creates a dummy AVI file in essence a shortcut to the original files and WMM accepted the file and encoded it.

As for ripping the DVD I used DVD Decrypter + AnyDVD as DVD Decrypter is no longer developed but it still has the best UI allowing you to pick off elements of the DVD which is how I extracted an episode from the DVD.

Yeah I gave the Movie pro converter a go as well not really a well developed program it works only on full DVDs and it quite buggy.

I came across two guides for encoding DVDs to WMV that may be worth following.
Guide 1
Guide 2

Edit: One more update
Still puzzled by this mess I went browsing around Doom9 and low & behold came across this thread about the exact same issue encoding DVD's to WMV, basically there re two methods outlined in there for converting DVDs to WMV but both are not newbie friendly and I had difficulty myself.

I wonder if crazy rumour of XviD support coming to the Xbox 360 would support fast forward & rewind seems unlikely...