The Gamer's Quarter

[aderack]

Narrowing down the causes. I know I posted about this before, somewhere or other. Maybe it was here. I'm posting this both here and at IC, though, because this is driving me nuts.

My Xbox 360 media viewer seems to crash whenever I load a directory containing XviD-encoded .avi files and it tries to build thumbnails out of them. The only way I can get it to load the files is to restart and quickly go to the same directory, in which the system will have substituted generic thumbnails. Navigate too far away, though, and the problem resumes.

Is there any way I can avoid this problem? It's really irritating.
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[simplicio]

sounds like codec issues. I've had the same problem in windows XP, which was alleviated by installing a few codec packs. dunno how much of that you can do on a 360 though.
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"Worlds turn the new machine to thee. To thee. Though, thine the new machine space."
-Kurt Schwitters, 1919

[skonrad]

I've been using Tversity lately (http://www.tversity.com/home ) as it does live transcoding of files that Media Centre can't view, and does so by transcoding it into WMV. Sometimes it doesn't work, but it's probably worth giving a try.

[aderack]

Translate "transcode". is this a recompression, or is this, like, flipping a few bits to turn an XviD file into a DivX one?
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[skonrad]

Bit flipping would be more accurate, I guess.

It takes a source, reads in about a minute of it, converts it to a format the destination device can view, sends it, and begins converting the next minute. This basically allows the client (xbox) to view files it isn't specifically programmed to view. It's especially good for things like Real Media, etc. which you would have to re-encode into WMV or DivX to view.

The awesomer part of it is that it also creates a flash site at

http://192.168.X.XXX:41952/flashlib (where x is replaced with the host computer's IP address)

so that any web enabled device on your network that can play flash videos (wii, ps3, psp, etc.) can use that interface to access them. Flash video transcoding is a bit of a resource hog, though, so it doesn't work on HD files unless you have a super fast processor.

[aderack]

Oh! I see what's going on here. This is clever!
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[skonrad]

The sometimes annoying downside is that you have to click a reload button on the host to get tversity to update the shared directories -- there's nothing on the client side (yet) that will force the update. It's 85% awesome, though.