Two steps forward, one step back. But progress!

Last weekend, I saw a post on theGreenButton that Andy Van Til posted a “Early Release” version of his popular tool todvrms that now supports conversion to the new WTV container format.  Unlike pre-Windows7 MediaCenter’s dvr-ms format, WTV supports H264 which holds promise for easier conversion of 720P/1080P HD content. 

So I got the bits today and got it a whirl.  After working through some weird errors which forced me to reinstall DVRMSToolBox and Haali Media Splitter, I was finally able to test!   For some reason, the first couple of sample files I was attempting to convert were x264, and todvrms threw an error stating “An invalid media type was specified.”  I always thought x264 was just an open source implementation of h264… i need to research it some more…

Doh!! … the audio stream was DTS.  I’ll need to run it through EAC3to first. Anyway,  I then found a h264 sample file with a AC3 audio track.  it was 20GB 1080P file, and todvrms had it flipped to WTV container in less than 10 minutes.  That’s fast!  Things were looking promising!

I then fired up my Xbox360 extender and it found the WTV file in the Movie Library.  It started up right away (no buffering message)… but then started skipping.   I know the 360 has the horse power to decode these high bitstreams because they play fine from the DashBoard, but the poor codec implementation within the Extender app continues to frustrate me. 

I’ll hook-up Linksys DMA2200 early next week and give that a shot with the 1080P streams.  Stay tuned!

Update: Hooked up the DMA2100 today and… nothin.  Linksys Extenders don’t support H264 (not even sure they support WTV container), and I knew that already so why did I waste the time?  Doh!

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