**Update Visit http://www.ryanwalsh.ca/blog/?p=8 for a new polished tutorial similar to this one, to convert all of your MKV’s to WMV (DTS support included).

Thanks again to Cody Browning for helping many of us come up with this conversion method. His original thread from xbox-scene.com can be found here.

The Xbox 360 was officially released by Microsoft on May 12, 2005, as a 7th generation gaming console, and network ready media center extender. The hardware capabilities of the Xbox 360 make it the best high definition video player on the market for its price. However, the software limitations imposed upon that hardware by Microsoft leave much to be desired by users hoping to to consolidate their living room multimedia equipment into one box. The biggest fall back of those limitations is by far the lacking support for any digital video file support other than WMV. The majority of internet available digital video content is not in WMV format.

The current popular format for internet digital high definition video content is Matroska video (MKV). MKV container files include x264 HD video content (720p, 1080i, and 1080p), along with 5.1 AC3 or DTS audio. The Xbox 360’s software limitations prevent it from being able to display MKV HD video files. This tutorial will demonstrate one method of converting MKV files into WMV-HD video files with 5.1 audio surround sound, using Windows XP or Windows Vista.

Required:

Background:

There are lots of different video codec combinations that can be used to decode MKV files, however, many of these packaged tend to have conflicting versions of video codecs (namely ffdshow) which cause unsatisfactory encodes to WMV-HD (choppiness, image quality, etc). It is my recommendation to uninstall all existing video codecs on the machine which will be used to encode the WMV-HD video, and install only the codecs listed above. Install any other future necessary codecs one at a time, and test encodes to verify that the new codecs have not introduced any problems.

Unfortunately TMPG 4.0 Express is not a free or open source product. I’ve chosen it in my demonstration because of its ease of use, flexibility of encode times/quality settings, and price.

Preparation:

  1. Uninstall all existing video codecs and reboot.
  2. Install TMPG 4.0 Express.
  3. Install Xvid
  4. Install ffdshow tryouts
  5. Install Haali Media Splitter
  6. Extract wmv-hd.zip into a temporary directory.
    1. Contents of wmv-hd.zip
      (contents of wmv-hd.zip)
    2. Install Avisynth.
    3. Install MKVtoolnix.
    4. Copy all of the files from the MKVextractGUI folder to the folder where MKVtoolnix was installed (c:\program files\MKVtoolnix by default).
  7. Create a temporary directory which will be used to store MKV files to be converted. For the remainder of this tutorial, I will refer to this directory as c:\wmv_convert\ .
    1. Copy “Xbox 360 720 VBR.txp4e” to c:\wmv_convert .

After completing the above steps, you are now ready to convert MKV (x264) to WMV-HD for the Xbox 360.

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