Bitrate suggestion? -> XVID to MP4 <-

[brijazz]

I've got some XVID files at 624x352, and I'm going to be converting them to MP4 for viewing on my Xbox360. I intend to keep the resolution the same, but need help selecting a good bitrate for the video in order to keep a quality that's similar to the XVIDs, and a reasonable file size. Any suggestions?

[ronnylov]

MP4 can have xvid video content so you do not need to convert the video. The audio is normally AAC in MP4 so all you need to do is extracting the raw streams from the avi file, reencode audio and then mux with a software like MeGUI.

See this MP4 guide:
http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/mp4.htm

[Baldrick]

But does the xbox360 support xvid in mp4? Isn't it just avc/h264?

[brijazz]

@ Baldrick:

You're right, the 360 won't do Xvid in MP4 containers, so conversion is a must. Just trying to figure out the best bitrate when I do convert.

[ronnylov]

OK, I did not know that (I don't own a xbox).
But if there is a constant quality mode in x.264 then just set it to an acceptable quality and let the file size be whatever it needs to.

In general H.264 is around 25% more effective than xvid so if the xvid is 1000 kbit/s the h.264 would probalby be fine at 800 kbit/s if using the same source video. But now your source are recompressed from the xvid, not from the same original source so you will loose some quality here no matter what you do.

[brijazz]

@ Ronnylov -->

Thanks, that's exactly the info I needed. I'll start at 75% of my source's bitrate and adjust as needed.

[SatStorm]

For even better results, I suggest you to try to load your source to virtualdub (or a variation, like virtualdub mpeg2). Filter, etc, then encode to avi using the unofficial version of x264.

Just my opinion