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I've searched the forum up and down and either I'm not very bright or nobody has asked this before, but I'm looking to convert all my media to WTV so that it plays on my xbox system, etc.

Ideally I'd like to use the WTV container that allows for H.264 & ac3 audio - I've tried a few walkthroughs, but I find that many of my MKVs end up unplayable on the xbox 360 and my AVI files just crash todvrms.

From what I've read and understand (though I could be wrong), todvrms just changes the container and does no re-encoding. So, now I'm wondering what would the ideal input file format is to get to wtv. I invision a process using something like handbrake/mencoder/ffmpeg to get every file I have to a controlled intermediate format that will work best with todvrms. I know that the ac-3 audio is supposed to be 5.1, 448kbps, but I have no clue about ideal bitrates, etc, etc. (I'm not having luck finding any info that helps in this regard.)

I am wondering if anyone else on this forum has had the same idea and has implemented it successfully. Whether it's manual or automatic, I'll take anything at this point.

FYI: So far, I've tried using mencoder to make a good intermediate mkv file... Here's the profile I have so far, but frankly, the output looks like ass..

lavdopts=threads=2
vf=pp=md,harddup
ovc=x264=yes
x264encopts=crf=23:partitions=all:subq=6:8x8dct:me=umh:frameref=5:bframes=3:b_pyramid:weight_b:threads=2
ffourcc=H264
oac=lavc=yes
lavcopts=acodec=ac3:abitrate=320:channels=6
#DtbExtension=mkv
#dtbhres="-vf pp=md,harddup"

Trying ffmpeg:

ffmpeg.exe -y -i <infile> -crf 20.0 -vcodec libx264 -acodec ac3 -ab 320k -channels 6 -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -partitions +parti4x4+partp8x8+partb8x8 -me_method hex -subq 6 -me_range 16 -g 150 -keyint_min 25 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -b_strategy 1 -threads 0 <outputfile>

Quality much, much better. So, I went off to todvrms and made it into a .wtv file - when I went to play it on the xbox360, I had a black screen for about 10 seconds, then the video just started at that point, 10s into it. I can skip back to the beginning and watch it from 0, but something is still wrong.

 Any suggestions?