Converting MKV to WMV for the XBOX360

[zilbermm]

Hi,

I previously used GOTSent to convert my MKV movies to MP4 and it worked great and fast, but unfortunately XBOX supports only 2 channels with this format.
I found out that WMV-HD can be played on the XBOX with 5.1 channels so i used encode360 to convert and it went great, but... 2 questions -

1. I have a pretty old PC, around 4 years old, and selecting the best quality conversion produced a file which is more than twice in size and took a day and a half to convert.
Is there anything faster that can produce the same quality?

2. The audio in the original file is DTS. Now my receiver recognizes PLII when i play the WMV-HD file through the XBOX360. Is that OK?

Thanks in advance

[mh2360]

If your computer details are accurate, then you will be waiting for a long time with any WMV conversion, unless you drop the quality to an unacceptable level.

You might want to consider converting to AVI (XviD) and converting the DTS to 5.1 AC3 audio, it should be faster to encode than WMV, and should be OK on the Xbox 360.

XviD4PSP should be OK for this, but I have never tried it with DTS sources.

[zilbermm]

Sorry, the details are not up to date.

MB - MSI 945PL NEO-F 7.1 1GLAN
Display adapter - MSI 7600GT
Processor - PD820 2.8 2M DUALCORE
2GB RAM

See this link for XBOX360 support -

http://support.xbox.com/support/en/us/nxe/gamesandmedia/movies/videofaq/viewvideoplaybackfaq.aspx

The MKV sources i use are usually 720p, but if i convert MKV to avi, wouldn't i lose quality?
The WMV-HD file i produces looks great, almost lossless i would say.

[El Heggunte]

The MKV sources i use are usually 720p, but if i convert MKV to avi, wouldn't i lose quality?

The WMV-HD file i produces looks great, almost lossless i would say.

WMV9 actually compresses worse (and slower ) than XviD for the same level of visual quality.

[mh2360]

The MKV sources i use are usually 720p, but if i convert MKV to avi, wouldn't i lose quality?
The WMV-HD file i produces looks great, almost lossless i would say.

A 720p XviD file would probably look just as good as the WMV version and XVID4PSP does have an AVI HD preset.

Encode360 is a good encoder, but is limited in what settings you can change, what's missing in particular is Windows Media Encoder's -v_performance setting, which can drastically increase encoding speed, with very little quality loss.