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[bkniceley]

Ive been trying to find a different way to play divx movies on the 360 other than the crappy way of transcoding them.  Finally i came across an idea and decided to try it out.  Its interesting, but does not work 100% as i will explain in a minute.  Hopefully someone can help me to get it functioning.. im not that smart with these things, however, this is what I did.  

Originally I installed the Orb program in order for it to register a mcl file to media center(I am using vista 64bit).  I only did this because I have no idea how to add an mcl file to Media Center's programs.  But anyway i did that.  Next thing I did was open up the orb.mcl file with notepad and changed the "url=.." to "url=C:\movie.html".  I saved that and u can change the name of the program, thumbnail images, etc.. but thats all u need to do.

Next I made an html file in my C directory called movie.html and embedded a media player in it.  

<OBJECT id="VIDEO" width="320" height="240"
   style="position:absolute; left:0;top:0;"
   CLASSID="CLSID:6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6"
   type="application/x-oleobject">
   
   <PARAM NAME="URL" VALUE="C:\lp.avi">
   <PARAM NAME="AutoStart" VALUE="True">
   <PARAM name="uiMode" value="none">
   <PARAM name="PlayCount" value="9999">
        <PARAM name="FullScreen" value="True">
        <PARAM name="Volume" value="100">
</OBJECT>

looks like that.  Switch the url to whatever video file on your pc that you want.  Autostart has to be true since u cannot navigate a webpage to press the play button.  Full screen has to be true as well to have it full screen.

Anyway,  I tested this at first on a divx file and noticed that it actually started playing!  However, the video was choppy and frames skipped all over the place.  I could not hear any audio(that is why I added the volume param above to 100; although i still havent heard anything) but this could be due to the cut frames.  After this i was confused since i saw parts of the video but it was not playing correctly.  So I put a webstream(asx) in the url in embeded wmp and it did the exact same thing!  But if i play the file in the videos section of media center on the 360 it plays exactly fine! with audio!  I am wondering if any of the code is wrong or maybe it is my pc? Im just confused because this should work and it looks like it should work since it is just overlaying the video on the tv no? Anyway hope someone can help as I despise the transcoding crap

[impimpin206]

QUOTE(bkniceley @ Jul 12 2007, 09:15 PM)

Ive been trying to find a different way to play divx movies on the 360 other than the crappy way of transcoding them.  Finally i came across an idea and decided to try it out.  Its interesting, but does not work 100% as i will explain in a minute.  Hopefully someone can help me to get it functioning.. im not that smart with these things, however, this is what I did.  

Originally I installed the Orb program in order for it to register a mcl file to media center(I am using vista 64bit).  I only did this because I have no idea how to add an mcl file to Media Center's programs.  But anyway i did that.  Next thing I did was open up the orb.mcl file with notepad and changed the "url=.." to "url=C:\movie.html".  I saved that and u can change the name of the program, thumbnail images, etc.. but thats all u need to do.

Next I made an html file in my C directory called movie.html and embedded a media player in it.  

<OBJECT id="VIDEO" width="320" height="240"
   style="position:absolute; left:0;top:0;"
   CLASSID="CLSID:6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6"
   type="application/x-oleobject">
   
   <PARAM NAME="URL" VALUE="C:\lp.avi">
   <PARAM NAME="AutoStart" VALUE="True">
   <PARAM name="uiMode" value="none">
   <PARAM name="PlayCount" value="9999">
        <PARAM name="FullScreen" value="True">
        <PARAM name="Volume" value="100">
</OBJECT>

looks like that.  Switch the url to whatever video file on your pc that you want.  Autostart has to be true since u cannot navigate a webpage to press the play button.  Full screen has to be true as well to have it full screen.

Anyway,  I tested this at first on a divx file and noticed that it actually started playing!  However, the video was choppy and frames skipped all over the place.  I could not hear any audio(that is why I added the volume param above to 100; although i still havent heard anything) but this could be due to the cut frames.  After this i was confused since i saw parts of the video but it was not playing correctly.  So I put a webstream(asx) in the url in embeded wmp and it did the exact same thing!  But if i play the file in the videos section of media center on the 360 it plays exactly fine! with audio!  I am wondering if any of the code is wrong or maybe it is my pc? Im just confused because this should work and it looks like it should work since it is just overlaying the video on the tv no? Anyway hope someone can help as I despise the transcoding crap

I don't understand the point of this... even if you get it working, this is still a pain in the ass process.

There's no way to play a divx on a 360 other than to encode / transcode the file to a compatible format. If you don't want to do that, then watch divx on your original xbox, or get a divx compatible upscaling DVD player for like $50 online.

[bkniceley]

Well I dont want to just play Divx, i also want to play h264, mp4, and other formats from my pc.  How was my divx file playing if it wasnt encoded to a compatible format?

[Software2]

Guess what orb is doing. Transcoding your video file to a format the 360 can play. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Orb's really designed for things like mobile phones or other low-res displays where the lower quality is okay.

[bkniceley]

Im not using orb... the only reason i installed it was so i could edit an mcl file for media center...

[BlaCkAdDa]

I think what is happening is orb is still acting on the calls made by MC. So whilst it looks to you like MC is reading a mcl file it is orb in between feeding video to MC

[bkniceley]

i uninstalled orb tho as soon as i got the mcl file.