How to split WMV? Or any other suggestions?

[darrklight1138]

Ok, this is my situation. I have an Xbox360 with an external hard drive connected to it. I want to put HD movies on that harddrive so that I can watch them through my 360 without the bother of physical media.

I successfully converted an MKV file to an HD WMV file via TMPGEnc. Now the bitrate calculator for some reason cannot predict the file size due to my settings, so I have to trial and error the results which takes a LOT of time and effort.

With 1000kbps, the picture quality was decent but motion was awful. I increased it to 2000 and the results were better, but not ideal. So I went to 5000, but unfortunately the hard drive is FAT32, and has a 4GB file size limitation. The HD WMV file after conversion was just over 5GB so I could NOT move it to my external harddrive. I cannot convert the harddrive to NTFS because the 360 is not compatible with that format, despite the fact that Microsoft is trying to eliminate FAT32.

So my options are two:

-Retain the hopefully ideal quality of 5000kbps (don't know if 5k is good since I have no way of getting it on my harddrive or any storage device to plug into my 360) and split the WMV file into 2 parts.

-Encode the WMV file for a lower bit rate.

So my questions are:

-If I split the WMV files, how can I do this? I have Windows Media Encoder but I cannot find any instructions on splitting the file. Is there another program that can handle this splitting without having to re-encode?

If I encode the WMV file with a lower bit rate, what is a good bit rate that can keep the file under 4 GBs? 2500kbps? 3500kbps?

Or if I am taking the longer and harder route, feel free to recommend better options. I have been at this for DAYS trying to make this work, and I am getting closer, but I am wasting sooo much time and power doing this. It's exhausting

Thanks!

[darrklight1138]

Sorry to have to bump this, but I still haven't resolved this issue. If anyone could help me out I would be thankful.

[Baldrick]

Have you tried asfbin, Cut Assistant? I don't know if they support hd wmvs though.

Use a bitrate calculator and you can calculate the bitrate and output file size, https://www.videohelp.com/tools/sections/bitrate-calculators

[darrklight1138]

Ah! ASFBin seems to do the job exactly! Thank you very very much!

[jman98]

Tips for using bit rate calculators...

Any time you encode with VBR instead of CBR, you can't predict the final size very well. For best results, set your average to what the calculator said to use and set the minimum and maximum to the same different above and below the average bit rate. For example, encoding with an average bit rate of 4000 Kbps and a minimum of 3000 and a maximum of 5000 should give roughly the same size file as encoding with a constant bit rate of 4000. Also, using a value slightly less than the calculator predicts is often a good idea. Bit rate calculators assume constant bit rate. VBR encoding is just impossible to predict and doing something like encoding with an average of 4000, a maximum of 9000 and a minimum of 3000 will certainly lead to a bigger file than calculated.

asfbin can split WMV files. I've used it for that and it works fine.

If Microsoft really wanted to eliminate FAT32, they would just give away the specs for the file system. I'm sure that some parts of Microsoft do want to get rid of FAT32, but the parts that charge for everything haven't gotten the message.

[darrklight1138]

Looks like I spoke to soon. When I split the file with asfbin, I have to actually rename the file with the .wmv extension or it will save it as the original HD file. But even when I rename it, my 360 does not recognize the wmv file. So I need to look into another alternative I guess

Right now I am using mkvmerge to split the file, and then I will try and use TMPGEnc to convert it. I'll see if that works.