XBOX360 DivX quality

MakeMyDay

So this has been bugging me for some time. I have my XBOX360 connected to my WLAN.
I want to stream my movies from the PC to the XBOX and I succeed but the quality isn't very good. In fact it is very pixel-y. Not that it isn't watchable , but on a HDTV it is noticable.
I haven't seen anybody else talk about this , so I started thinking.. is this maybe a problem with my WLAN? It is a standard 54mbit WLAN , on a typical shitty router.
Any tips?

KMFurDM

How big are your monitors and what resolution are the videos?

MakeMyDay

Perhaps I should have mentioned this in my original post:

The videos all look better when I connect my PC directy to my 26" either by HDMI or VGA. This is without any postprocessing effect from the computer side. the resolution is standard DVD resolution so something like 720×576.

So there is some quality loss when I play through the XBOX..

PirateJon

Could be. 802.11 isn't designed for QoS.

Hook it up with a cat5 cable = you'll know if it's related to your wireless network or not.

shutz

What software are you running on the PC side to share the videos? WMP11? TVersity? ORB? Something else?

If it's WMP11, try this: burn the video file to a CD or DVD (depending on size) and play it directly on the 360. If you get the same quality problems, then you'll know it's the 360's decoding that's causing the problem. If it looks good, then it's the network, although I think WMP doesn't try to send a lossy stream, it just streams the file itself, so that if you had network problems, the video would stutter or pause, but it shouldn't drop in quality.

If you're using TVersity (which I recommend!) or ORB, or something similar, then you should make sure you're running the latest version, and check your settings: make sure it's set to transcode only when needed (since the 360 should be able to decode a DivX stream on its own) and that all the quality settings for transcoding are also at maximum. If you're using a powerful CPU (Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, at least, I would say) you can even tell it to do the rescaling, so your PC will send an up-converted video to the 360. The only problem with this is that it uses a lot of disk space and processing power, and could cause major pauses in the video, but the upside is that it should make your videos look their best.

One more thing, your PC might have some special codecs installed which filter the video, and smooth out some of the artifacts caused by DivX compression (blockiness during fast movement, for instance.) You say you don't have any post-processing effects activated on the PC side, but some of these effects are activated by default, without your knowledge.

The 360 doesn't have those same filters, so it will sometimes cause videos to look worse because of that.

Lastly, check that your DivX files really are 720x576 or something like that (you're in PAL-land, right? if you were in NTSC-land, DVD-quality video would be 720x480.) If it's any smaller, it will look all the blockier on the 360. A lot of DVD rips you'll download from torrent sites and the like will have their resolution dropped a little bit in exchange for lowering the necessary bitrate that will avoid the blockiness during fast movement.