Capturing video directly to .mp4 or .wmv ... (something other than .m2t)?

[mnations]

Hi,

I have an HV30 and was wondering if there was a way to directly capture video to H.264, WMV, or MPEG-4 Part 2. Basically, I want to get video onto my computer that I can play directly on my XBOX 360 with having to encode it into something else.

Both Sony Vegas and HDV Split capture video directly to .m2t which the 360 does not recognize. Trying to simply change the suffix to .mpg does not work.

So I don't really need help in ways to convert it to something that will work. I know how to do that, but I have hours of video on tape and would like to simply offload and watch.

Thanks ahead of time.

[Atnas]

You can't.

Encoding is a very time consuming process, you can't just skip it in some easy way.
If you want to just play and watch, connect your HV30 to your TV, sit back and enjoy.

If the xbox supports mpg you might find a solution that creates an mpg file, but don't get too excited.

[vince]

There is a device that may do that. The Matrox MXO2 mini with max. It's not cheap.

[CycleWriter]

Please post to the proper subforum and always do a search before posting as many subjects, including this one, have been covered before. M2t is nothing more than an MPG wrapper. You can simply change the .m2t extension on your files to .mpg to have them recognized by the XBOX. Some software may balk at this, but Windows Media Player isn't one of them. Programs like Ulead's Video Studio andCyberlink's PowerDirector capture video from the HV to .mpg directly.

[Atnas]

Trying to simply change the suffix to .mpg does not work.

You can simply change the .m2t extension on your files to .mpg to have them recognized by the XBOX.

Did you even read his post through?
Although that is what I thought too at first :D

Unfortunately I don't have an XBOX thus I can't test it out if mnations is doing something wrong.

[mnations]

Thanks for the advice.

After I tried feeding it a video changed from .m2t to .mpg with no success I tried a standard .mpg video I had with no success either. After that I checked their website where it looks like they don't support either option:

XBox 360 Video Streaming FAQ (http://support.xbox.com/support/en/us/nxe/gamesandmedia/movies/videofaq/viewvideoplaybackfaq.aspx)

I found this a little surprising, given the fact that this is usually supported. However that's why I was trying to get it into an .mp4 or .wmv format directly.

[CycleWriter]

Thanks for the advice.

After I tried feeding it a video changed from .m2t to .mpg with no success I tried a standard .mpg video I had with no success either. After that I checked their website where it looks like they don't support either option:

XBox 360 Video Streaming FAQ (http://support.xbox.com/support/en/us/nxe/gamesandmedia/movies/videofaq/viewvideoplaybackfaq.aspx)

I found this a little surprising, given the fact that this is usually supported. However that's why I was trying to get it into an .mp4 or .wmv format directly.

Yeah, I was thinking PS3, not XBOX. PowerDirector has a free 30 day trial. I suggest you try it. Even if you don't like the editor (nowhere near as powerful as Vegas, but pretty good for simple stuff) you can still use it to capture straight to .mpg.

[CycleWriter]

Did you even read his post through?

Shaddup!:hv20-smilie84: I don't have time to read posts completely, I have newbies to suck the joy out of.:hv20-smilie87:

BTW, every time I see your avatar I just can't take you seriously. He (you?) looks like such a goon.:hv20-smilie84:

[2Bdecided]

You should google for Xbox 360 MPEG-2.


You can't transcode to MPEG-4 HD on the fly (as you capture) because the encoding takes too long (far slower than real time) - with faster processors and/or simplified encoders it would be possible, but not yet.

Cheers,
David.

[Atnas]

Shaddup!:hv20-smilie84: I don't have time to read posts completely, I have newbies to suck the joy out of.:hv20-smilie87:

BTW, every time I see your avatar I just can't take you seriously. He (you?) looks like such a goon.:hv20-smilie84:

Rock on, and suck the joy! You should although consider slowing a little down at times.

And, yes, that is actually me.. A year ago.. my facial expression hasn't gotten better.:hv20-smilie45:

[racer-x]

Don't own an XBOX, but try changing the extension to "TS" from m2t. See if it plays then. Otherwise you may have to demux into elemental streams and re-mux into a proper Program Stream (mpg). You can do the later with TMPGEnc and/or other tools.

[mnations]

Well, for posterity's sake I wanted to add an update in case anyone else tries the same thing. Specifically I'm trying to take video captured on my Sony HV30, put it on an HP MediaSmart EX485 and play it on an XBOX 360.

It became apparent quickly that capturing straight to another format was not an option. Therefore it became an exercise in finding the easiest path to getting a bunch of clips from an HD tape encoded in a format that the 360 will accept.

First problem was finding a tool that would convert all of the clips in one sweep without having to do each one individually. I used a tool called Format Factory which allows you to queue up all of the videos and convert them based on the configuration assigned to each clip in the queue. It also allows you to pause, which is nice since this operation basically ties up the computer for hours.

According to the website I posted earlier for the 360 video specs, I tried all of those options to see what looked the best on the 360. Files converted to .mp4 files with DivX compression looked the best without taking too much time for the conversion, so I queued them up and converted all 30 clips.

Next day I transferred them to the shared video folder on the media server. Strangely enough, even though all of the files appeared in the folder and would play on the computer, they would not all show up in the 360 dashboard display which streams the video. Specifically, out of 30 videos clips 2, 4, 9, 16, 18, and 25. This appeared to be totally random. They tended to be larger videos, but some of the videos that would show up were larger than some that would not.

I read a suggestion to change the suffix to an .avi file, so I tried that. After making the change some of the missing files appeared but then other files disappeared. Really strange. I tried splitting them up into multiple folders. Still had intermittent files not appearing.

At first I suspected the media server. HP MediaSmart uses TwonkyMedia which may or may not have a bug that caused this. Either way the interaction between TwonkyMedia and the 360 was not passing this data correctly.

After more research I found another page on this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/945416?sd=xbox

This website gave more clarity than the first one, specifically in Question 10 which shows that H.264 or Mpeg4 videos are not supported from Windows Home Server to the 360. So this may explain the intermittent functionality.

Either way, I decided to encode them all as WMV files instead. I figured I would have better luck using a Windows format with a Microsoft product. So I tried this, queued them all up and let it run.

Now, all the files are appearing, but they won't all play....ARGH!

However now the problem is further upstream, and for some reason Format Factory is not able to do all the conversions correctly. These particular files may need to be done with another application, but it can convert them properly to an H.264 format but not a WMV format. The only piece that appears is the sound, but video is totally dropped which basically creates a small audio file.

The end conclusion so far is that if you are using this configuration your safest bet is to go with a WMV file. I know that's not a popular option with a lot of video guys, but other formats seem to cause erratic behavior.

Frustrating to say the least, but I still love technology.

[Video Frank]

Try a Hauppaugge HD PVR. It will accept *only* component video from your HV (not HDMI), does some jiggery-pokery inside and voila! AVC output via USB to your computer.

[mnations]

Ok, I've worked my way upstream a little more to find something interesting. I'm not sure that Sony Vegas is doing a proper capture around scene splits.

I decided to download another tool that is designed to handle .m2t files (there aren't many) called MPEG Streamclip. When I attempted to open some of the problem files I had before I received this message:


One or more transport stream files have a bad size. Do you want to open them anyway?

While I don't know much about the innards of video transmission, the transport stream format looks a lot like telecom transmission standards that I'm very familiar with. This seems to be telling me that some of the header data in the stream is invalid, therefore it may have no way of knowing where some of the data is.

If that's the case, then that might explain some of the problems with the .mp4 files where the 360 couldn't recognize the files. In the list of video files the 360 also shows how long each file is, which means it's trying to read some of the data in the file and not just display the title. If the file size is corrupted and the 360 can't read the info, it may just skip the file altogether.

To test this I tried to open an .m2t file that I captured using another application, HDVSplit. It was able to open this file and not throw any errors.

I think the problem may lie in the ability of Sony Vegas to properly capture scene changes. If you just capture bits of video, then it appears to work better. I tried this out on video I had captured previously, letting Sony Vegas start/stop the recording. That video did not have any problems either when opened by MPEG Streamclip. But something about the scene changes is causing it to improperly populate the stream headers.

The other problem with the WMV files appear to be related to what others have mentioned in the thread previously. Format Factory is expecting a PS format instead of TS format. I downloaded a tool called RemuxTS to change the format on a file I had converted directly from .m2t to .wmv which did not work. However after changing the format using RemuxTS it was able to properly encode the video to WMV and play it. So now I understand what was being referred to about getting a proper stream.

[2Bdecided]

You know when I said this...

You should google for Xbox 360 MPEG-2.
...it wasn't just a random suggestion - I'd tried it, and found simple answers to your problem that didn't include transcoding.

Cheers,
David.

[mnations]

You know when I said this...

...it wasn't just a random suggestion - I'd tried it, and found simple answers to your problem that didn't include transcoding.

Cheers,
David.

I did google it, but from what I saw it appeared that you needed a media center extender to act as a proxy between WHS and the 360 in order to avoid transcoding. Or you needed a PC with XP or Vista that have Windows Media Center integrated with it. I don't have either of those.

So please let me know if I missed something in the reading of those results, but all signs were pointing to WHS not being capable of streaming mpegs directly to the 360 without another device.

[craw169]

i use my xbox 360, streaming is a pain, don't stream it, put it on a memory stick or an external harddrive, connect the drive to the 360 and play the video from there. works fine.

[mnations]

Ok, so here's a formula that works:

HV30 -> Sony Vegas [.m2t] -> RemuxTS [.mpg] -> Factory Formula [.wmv]

All videos show up. All videos play.

I'm still experimenting with the capture. For the next tape I'm going to use HDVSplit for the whole thing instead and see if the endpoints are better.

With Sony Vegas capture the end of clips can be all screwy, and sometimes it splits scenes that should not have been split. I still think it may be screwing up the transport stream. Fortunately Factory Formula also has a video merge function that makes it easy enough to put the scenes back together.

[CycleWriter]

I think the problem may lie in the ability of Sony Vegas to properly capture scene changes.

This is a well known issue with Vegas going back to version 6. During capture, it has a tendency to split scenes a few frames early leaving you with a brief flash of the next scene at the end of your clips. It is easy to fix in editing so long as you always give your scenes a little extra when filming.

[mnations]

This is a well known issue with Vegas going back to version 6. During capture, it has a tendency to split scenes a few frames early leaving you with a brief flash of the next scene at the end of your clips. It is easy to fix in editing so long as you always give your scenes a little extra when filming.

Hm, you'd think after 3 versions they could fix this.

Do you think this could screw up the transport stream as well? Because when I was trying to open up these files with other apps I was basically getting the equivalent of a checksum error, the data not being the same size as what was given in the headers.

[mnations]

Here's a formula that works in case people don't want to buy Sony Vegas. All the components are free.

HV30 -> HDVSplit[.m2t] -> RemuxTS [.mpg] -> Factory Formula [.wmv]

Video quality was the same, and HDVSplit actually pulls a cleaner capture without bleeding over into other clips.

On the MP4 front, I tried converting them all the MP4s after remuxing them with them but had the same results. Larger files just don't show up.

TwonkyMedia has an H.264 converter built-in that's supposed to create MP4s if you feed it MPGs. So I sent the remuxed clips into it with bad results. They all converted but a few did not appear (different ones this time). The ones that did appear were bad quality with the wrong aspect ratio. So this is not a solution.

[2Bdecided]

I did google it, but from what I saw it appeared that you needed a media center extender to act as a proxy between WHS and the 360 in order to avoid transcoding. Or you needed a PC with XP or Vista that have Windows Media Center integrated with it. I don't have either of those.Sorry - thought the latter would be an option - my mistake!

Cheers,
David.