Help a noob with some media questions for my Xbox and portable player

[Sulsa]

Hello,

We drive long places quite often so we often use a DVD player to help the kids not kill each other. I have most of our children's DVD's stored on my computer to ISO's or VOB's so that I can make replacements when they are damaged from being mishandled in the vehicle.

Recently our portable DVD player started skipping having some other problems, which got me thinking about a replacment. After thinking about it, the best way to go would be solid state. I looked at many units that can play divx via usb, both there is nothing with two screens like my current setup. This problem got me thinking that I could use my old Axim X51V (VGA Windows PDA) as a media player and connect it to the two screens with an Axim to VGA and a VGA to composit Cable (and a Y cable to split the video) to the two screens.

I also have Vista machine I just connected to my Xbox 360. Pretty cool. I've been doing research on how to play movies from my pc. My grand idea is to use the same files, probably Divx to use on my portable media system and streamed to my Xbox. I used the free version of Fairuse wizard (suggested in the forums) and the file worked great on my axim, but not so good on my xbox. Come to find out not all Divx files are the same (thanks video help forums). I see the full version has the capability to make the files xbox compatable. Which finally brings me to my questions:

1. Is divx the best format to use for my needs now and into the fore seeable future (I would hate to re-rip them all again)
2. Do you recommend FairUse Wizard to convert my iso's, vob's and dvd's to Divx?
3. Do you recommend any particular methods or have any other suggestions?

Please note that I prefer quality over hard drive space.

Thank you in advance for your expert advice!

[redwudz]

FUW is one of the easier all-in-one converters, but if you wanted higher quality you might look to the freeware AutoGK. It has a few more adjustments. I use Divx and Xvid both. If I want a higher quality, I would try a quantizer setting of maybe 2. You set that in the codec configurations. That should give you similar quality to the original.

With a typical DVD, a Divx/Xvid file size of 1 - 1.5GB should give you very good quality.

For higher compression/smaller file sizes, H.264 is popular, but takes a lot of CPU power to encode and play back.

I don't have a XBox, so none of this information may apply to that particular use.

And welcome to our forums.

[Sulsa]

Thanks for the information redwudz!

Much appreciated..

How different is FUW from AutoGK in quality?

Also do you happen to know if I will have any issues with splitting composite video at all?

Thanks!