Xbox 360 Still choppy after wired connection :-S

[admiralgadoosh]

This has been driving me mad for weeks. I have looked at a few guides and similar posts on here that I have tried to follow but had no luck myself so thought I would post my own to see if I'm doing anything wrong.

I am getting (no matter what the file format .avi .mkv etc..) choppy video playback on HD video files. Any file that is below 2gig lets say seems to work ok with no problems. I know it sounds mad but I have noticed that it seems to get choppy if there is any intense action on the screen, any normal scenes seem ok (and I know that sounds crazy but I'm sure it doesn't matter what going on on the screen or its just me and the choppy is just random !).

I have changed over to using wired from my router instead of wireless to see if that helps (even though the router was right next to the Xbox) but that didn't help. I was advised to enable flow control on my network adapter which I have done. I am using Shark codecs (fresh install) and a pretty new install of Windows 7. I have tried several configs of Shark codecs that I found on here but none seem to do the trick. At the moment its using LAV splitter but I have tried the other ones (I can provide details of settings if needed).

Pretty decent spec PC (without going in to detail - i5, 8gig ram, Nvidia 570)

Thanks in advance.

[FulciLives]

Should have bought a PS3 dude

[admiralgadoosh]

Really helpful. Thanks.

[usually_quiet]

You don't say what software you are using to stream the video. That information might be useful to some of the people here who have the experience to help you, since there is more than one solution for streaming video to a game console. TVersity seems to be the favorite, but some guides feature other streaming software or suggest using the XBox 360 as a media extender for Windows Media Center.

I don't own an XBox 360, but it is no secret that they don't have great versatility as media players, so media files must be converted to video and audio formats they support and/or copied to a different container file format before streaming. For that reason it is often easier in the long run to find a dedicated media player that has the features you want.

[yoda313]

@admiralgadoosh

usually_quiet is correct that a dedicated media player is ultimately the best solution. Something like a wdtv media player will save you loads of headaches. While they aren't perfect they do a lot very well. Using ntfs drives is a good start. Also mkv file reading helps. It has a wide codec support and the newer models do netflix and hulu (the paid version).

But for the xbox 360 you need to baby the files a bit. Chances are the profiles are too high and you have too many reference frames. It chokes on a lot of high end profiles.

I think they need to be the 4.0 profile at a maximum. I don't have the specs in front of me but you also need to lower the reference frames.

Also I think there has been a saying that it won't read any file over 4gig if its not a wmv file (even if its on a hfs+ drive that it can read large files on - it can't read ntfs drives).

So basically you need to dig around a bit more for ideal xbox 360 hd profile settings for video files. Like I said you can't crank it up to max and have it play smoothly. I think there is also a max bitrate but again I don't have hard numbers in front of me.

Suffice it to say instead of reencoding all of your videos to play on the xbox 360 it would be less frustating and in the long runner probably cheaper to buy a wdtv media player or one of its competitors.