Video X Ware’s Blog

There are folks that always question about how to make movies and music videos playable on XboX360 from devise video formats. For most of us, it seems like an impossible mission. We rushed out of getting a brand new video game console representing that it can playback almost all video files on the world, but ended up with depression.

From official site for XboX, we learned information as to the XboX360 that it supports such a bit of video formats as WMV, HD-WMV, H.264, and MPEG-4. It’s been said that if you got an Xbox 360 Component HD AV Cable connected to your high-definition or HD-ready television or monitor, you can view DVD movies in 480p and HD-DVD movies in 480p, 720p, or 1080i, and view both DVD and HD-DVD movies in any supported resolution up to 1080p with an Xbox 360 VGA HD AV Cable. So we are informed with the resolutions support.

Back to the purpose of this article, I would give you a technical way to convert video files unsupported by XboX360 into an XboX360 supported HD-WMV file in 1080p, and you can totally Do-It-Yourself with ease. Due to my personal buy, I will show you the whole process with a useful software tool – Xilisoft Video Converter (also, there is Xbox 360 converter now).

When the installation’s been done (you can download the software from http://www.mov-converter.com/xilisoft-video-converter-ultimate/x-video-converter-ultimate-91467.exe first), just get into the folder where you installed it (the path is usually specified at “C:\Program Files\Xilisoft\Video Converter 3” in default). Keep going into the “profile” folder, you will find a lot of files extension in .pf. That is what we are looking for. Open anyone of them using EditPlus (a tool of text editor, you can get one from http://www.editplus.com) or with Notepad, the extra editor of Microsoft, all secrets and mysteries for video and audio conversion exposed in our eyes!

Then, the next action is a snap I bet everyone can do it easily. Just right-click your mouse, select the sub-option “Text document” of “New” to make up a new file in the “Profile” folder. Rename it as the extension in .pf, and open it up. The last thing you’re gonna do is just to paste all offerings bold below into the new .pf file, and save the changes.

[Main]

Name=Xbox360 WMV 1080pTV Movie

SName=WMV

Format=xwmv

ExtName=wmv

IsSysProfile= yes  [Parameter]t=0, “”, “”

ss=0, “”, “”

title=0, “”, “”

author=0, “”, “”

copyright=0, “”, “”

comment=0, “”, “”

album=0, “”, “”

year=0, “”, “”

genre=0, “”, “”

composer=0, “”, “”

origaritist=0, “”, “”

url=0, “”, “”

encodedby=0, “”, “”

id3v2=0, “”, “True”

vcodec=0, “”, “wmv3x”, {”wmv1x”,”wmv2x”,”wmv3x”}

s=0, “”, “1440×1080″,{”640×480″, “720×480″, “1280×720″, “1440×1080″ , “1920×1080″}

b=0, “”, “2000″, { “1000″, “2000″, “3000″, “4000″, “5000″}

r=0, “”, “”

aspect=0, “”, “4:3″, {”4:3″, “16:9″}

sameq=0, “”, “”

vn=0, “”, “”

acodec=0, “”, “wma7x”, {”wma7x”}

ab=0, “”, “128″ar=0, “”, “48000″, {”48000″,”44100″,”32000″,”22050″}

ac=0, “”, “2 (Stereo)”, { “2 (Stereo)” }

an=0, “”, “” 

Surprisingly, there would be a new output profile named Xbox_mpeg2_1080pTV come out in the Video Converter with set of parameters available like video size and bit rate, and audio sample rate. Is that amazing? Be proud of yourself? Yup, you can Do-It-yourself!

A human being can’t live without oxygen, that is because the aerosphere. And a modern society can’t exist without information, that is because the surrounding sound and visual mediums. As this reality being accepted by people, we are also realizing that the MP4 is playing more important in sound and visual medium field.

Why said so? I bet everybody have ever experienced watching and listening to movies and music on a portable media player like an iPod, a PSP, a mobile phone, or a Zune and so on. When you are enjoying your colorful and fantastic video and audio entertaining, have you noticed that almost all of them support playing the .mp4 video files? And another question would pop out if you keep going, which may be asked as “what is the MP4?”.

Actually, the word “MP4″ was derived from MPEG-4, and the MPEG-4 comes from an abbreviate of Moving Picture Experts Group, a working group of ISO/IEC charged with the development of video and audio encoding standards which also issued MPEG-1 and MPEG-2.

There are two key parts of MPEG-4 aware to be the general MP4 file: MPEG-4 Part 2 and MPEG-4 Part 10. MPEG-4 Part 2 has been called MPEG SP/ASP as an Advanced Simple Profile used by codecs such as DivX, XviD, Nero Digital and 3ivx and by Quicktime 6 as well. MPEG-4 Part 10 mainly refers to the MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding) or H.264, which being used by the x264 codec, by Nero Digital AVC, by Quicktime 7, and by next-generation DVD formats like HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc. A unique part that should be mentioned either is the MPEG-4 Part 14, which has being used to commonly store digital video and audio streams, some other data like subtitles and static images, and some audio-only MP4 files called M4A.

Admittedly, there are still a lot of other formats fill in the Internet. No matter an AVI file, a WMV file, or an MOV or RM file, each of them plays prominent on the stage of information medium. But with more and more MP4 files generating and increasing, we are also calling more software applications in MP4 playing and converting.

Like iTunes from Apple and Media Player from Microsoft, we do have so many choices on MP4 conversion applications also, which can be freely chosen from different sorts of brands like Xilisoft, ImTOO, CUCUSOFT, and MP4Converter, etc. They are capable and professional of converting most popular video and audio formats into MP4 files for your iPod, PSP, or other portable players supported.

Wanna know more about MP4? Why not try some software yourself? It will make you the real expert on MP4!

As Christmas forthcoming, a new season of contest for the top of consumers’ holiday wishlists is starting off. Just a few weeks ago, Apple released the latest set of iPods – iPod classic and iPod touch, which learned more from iPhone tech. Conversely, as a so-called “leaked” Zune support document leaked around the Internet, Microsoft announced that its Zune 2.0 is coming out with a brand new Zune player, updated Zune Software, a refined music store online and Zune Social.

For those who bought or gotten a Zune 2.0 player as a Xmas’ present, it’s gonna be a little bit vexatious for some kind of video conversion troubles if they want to play a DVD movie on their Zune.

As we all know, the new Zune supports video and audio formats M4A, M4V, MP3, MP4 (MPEG-4 and MPEG-4 AVC/H.264), WMA, WMV. But the whole marketing of DVD ripper software cannot keep up with its update, coz most of them were still employing the former video and audio codecs with their programming while the new Zune’s compatible of more codecs.

Right now, new software has been released as a complement for this scarcity – Xilisoft DVD Ripper Ultimate.

It’s designed so user-friendly and multi-functional that you can easily find the output file fit for any media device or portable media player you want. For example, you are looking for the new Zune set, just press on the “Profile” block, and move your mouse on the “Portable Media”, appropriate outputs like Zune MPEG-4 AVC Video Format, Zune MPEG-4 Video, and Zune WMV – Windows Media Video, and other maybe you want are listed. That is way handily, isn’t it?

What’s more, this DVD ripper full in creative plan has also been enhanced with some great new functions beating all of us. You can choose to output any area of the original DVD movie, adjust transparent and position of subtitles showing in the output movies, set video brightness, contrast and saturation, and even snapshot any image of a DVD movie. And of course you can clip and merge any segment of the whole DVD movie.

Just imagine that, when you enjoy a holiday travel or relax on shuffle, you can watch and listen to the DVD movies and music all the time! What are you waiting for, hurry up!

For those who are driven crazy into racing or RPG games, Sony PlayStation3 is one of the best choices. It’s fabulous. With PlayStation3 or PS3 Featuring high-definition (HD) video with resolution of 1080p, Bluetooth, HDMI, you have every opportunity to experience best music and videos sitting at home and redefine your whole gaming life.

So what is PS3? It is the successor of PS2 manufactured by Sony. Being the third member of the Sony PlayStation series, the PS3 is much more sophisticated and advanced than its predecessor. And like the Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii, PlayStation3 is aiming to dominate the video gaming world by its luxuriant and significant functionalities.

Playstation3 has been recognized to be the first gaming console with next-generation primary storage media - Blu-ray Disc, while it also supports CDs, DVDs, HDDs and certain models of SACDs[1]. It supports sets of video formats, including MPEG-1, MPEG-2 (PS[2], TS[3]), H.264/MEPG-4 AVC, MPEG-4 and numerous other audio formats, including ATRAC[4], WAV (.wav). MP3 (.mp3), and so much more image file formats like GIF, PNG, JPEG and TIFF. The most brilliant fact about the PS3 is that it is capable of playing back content at a maximum bit rate of multiplex 48Mbps from Blu-ray Disc according to the BD (Blu-ray Disc) standards.

If you got a video file in 1080p resolution and at 48Mbps bit rate for 2hours, it’s obvious that it would cost more than 80GB space. So much same can be said for high-definition source movies, and it’s weird to consume such mass of space for just only one copy of HD movie. There are a lot of software PS3 video converters out there for choosing.

PS3 Video 9 is a free PS3 video converter deserving to download. It’s developed by Red Kawa, and allows you to convert your computer video files like AVI, DivX, MPEG, etc. into the specific video formats playable on PlayStation3. The other one I found worthy to own is PS3 Video Converter from MP4Converter.net. It contains all functions PS3 Video 9 have and more formats supporting. And even some MP4 video files such as a .mp4 clip (H.264, 1080p, 8145kbps, size of 56.4MB) that PS3 Video 9 is unable to handle can be converted into a smaller one (H.264, 1080p, 2198kbps, 15.2MB).

It’s hard to judge the pros and cons for each of them impersonally. Anyway, many of us are looking for the high quality behaving rather no-fee taking, although no-fee taking gets a little attractive.

Additionally, I commend an article which tells you how to convert videos to full HD 1080p and transfer to PS3 if you wanna be going any further.

[1] SACD (Super Audio Compact Disc): a high-resolution digital multichannel audio standard developed by Sony/Philips that uses DSD (Direct Stream Digital) audio encoding

[2] TS (Transport Stream): one type of the audio-with-video synchronization which are aimed for communication and broadcasting applications.

[3] PS (Program Stream): one type of the audio-with-video synchronization which can be used for storage applications such as DVD.

[4] ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding): a family of proprietary audio compression algorithms developed by Sony.

How to transfer music from iPod to Computer 

It’s been known that iTunes is management software released by Apple to match the applications of their unique portable multimedia player – iPod. Unfortunately, this real matched management tool doesn’t allow you to rip music off iPod and transfer to your local disk.

I was blown up with a kind of accident like this once. One day before three months, I’d just installed my iTunes after my operation system rebuilt. When I connected my iPod to my computer, calamity happened. All my music purchased on iTunes Store was removed from my iPod! Jesus! What a crash!

To Apple users, I have to say this function-lacking is sucks indeed! There must be a wondering why Apple doesn’t want to include something so obvious in their iTunes. What I thought is that they have a reason for not including it. Maybe it’s legal issues, maybe for marketing targets, or maybe they just can’t achieve this user requests more far away.

Ok, let us down to reality. Now, the most important is to find a solution which can completely fix this problem. For a long time searching, I got a good one which has easy ways to deal with my transferring troubles – Xilisoft iPod Rip!

The main usages are:

1.       Copy music and movies from computer to iPod

2.       Rip music and movies out of iPod, and backup them from iPod to computer locally

3.       Sync music from iPod to iTunes

I guess you may not be interested in the 1^st function which has been offered by iTunes and merely played well in lots of other programs. And the last two functions are what I’m emphasizing.

You know if I’ve held this software with the music backup function from iPod to computer, I would never be so mad at the iTunes for my purchased music lost. And it’s so easy to use, just check all the music and movies in playlist you want to export, and click the button in the middle of the user control panel, then you’ve had your iPod music and movies dig out!

The 3^rd function is more useful to kill the long time waiting for iTunes transfer. All you have to do is opening up the Xilisoft iPod Rip with iPod connected, checked all files, and one pressing on the 3^rd button can make your Sync from iPod to iTunes done in just a few minutes!

One attention: you need have iTunes installed first before using Xilisoft iPod Rip, otherwise the iPod cannot be recognized by this iPod manager.

Now we get total advantages and disadvantages from this iPod management tool of Xilisoft.

The beauties: multi-functions, easy to use, fast speed in importing and exporting, and iPhone support.

The shortcomings: don’t support photos importing and exporting temporarily, unable to execute the edition on music Tag info.

There’s also an premium feature deserved to mention, the maximum quantity is up to 500 for music and movies importing/exporting, which is allowed in the beta version as gift for you! For me, it’s the easiest way to rip music out of iPod, why not have a try? BTW, there’s an iPhone ringtone maker which can help you make iPhone ringtones and put the song to iPhone ringtone. That is also a useful iPhone ringtone creator!

It’s been a quite while now since Apple unleashed their iPhone, the smart and lightweight handheld device which have a gorgeous 3.5″ screen that can make phone talks, netsurf via internet with Safari, and play crisp videos and music as iPod. Admittedly, there are a lot of complaints from people about iPhone’s short life in battery, exclusive use for AT&T and high price. But we all have known and realized that iPhone has been playing a big number in Apple’s iPod family. In terms of the tech parameters published officially in Apple’s site, we noticed that except the screen size, all the video and audio formats supported by Video iPods are totally the same, especially the iPod Touch, it seems to be another iPhone just without the mobile phone connection. And the truth is, there are some differences amongst them, even they are very tiny so as to masses always overlook them unconsciously. For example, the iPhone’s requirement is video bit rate at 2.5Mbps, while the iPod Classic and iPod Nano can playing over 3.0Mbps. It doesn’t mean iPhone cannot support this 3.0Mbps kind, but if you’ve tried, you’d have to take my words, coz the 3.Mbps videos is unable to work on iPhone and iPod Touch. But what’s the matter if you are just playing videos in an iPod or an iPhone? In order to demonstrate what I said, I did some tests to compare the displaying quality between iPhone and iPod. First of all, I just converted a DVD video file to iPod MPEG-4 video format using Xilisoft DVD to iPod Converter, set the resolution at 480 by 320 and bit rate at 2.5Mbps. Then I did this conversion and settings again with the DVD to iPhone Converter of Xilisoft, whose output profile named iPhone MPEG-4 (480*320). After that, I transferred both converted video files into a iPod Nano and an iPhone respectively thru Xilisoft iPod Rip, an iPod transfer tool, and no surprising, the video quality plays well as in the same criterion just with your eyes. By the way, these tools from Xilisoft Corporation are way easy to use. The only spot which cannot content my needs is that the iPod rip doesn’t have an option to modify the file name, even though it did better at removing video files directly from iPod or iPhone than Apple’s iTunes.  So the conclusion is iPhone can play videos perfectly as Video iPod did. Just like my tests, maybe most DVD to iPod converter (DVD Converter) software can fulfil your requests in DVD to iPhone conversion no matter you owned a Video iPod and an iPhone or just one of them. 

According to the Wikipedia figures, more than 25 million units of PSP has been shipped worldwide already. Lots of PSP users who are hungry for more content to put onto their PSP have to admit that downloading movies onto PSP via the internet is the easiest and fastest way.

The only problem is the PSP can only support MP4 video formats (H.264/MPEG-4 AVC) while most movies and videos on the internet are the format of WMV, AVI or DivX. Chances are you have at least a small collection of videos on your hard drive – and those videos probably won’t be supported because PSP essentially does not have “WMV playing” or “AVI playing” supporting features!

Therefore, you will need a PSP video converter to convert the videos to be compatible with the PSP.

I’m using the ImTOO PSP Video Converter but other PSP conversion software should do the job as well.

Due to its wide LCD screen, playing video on the PSP is a little different, and, to get the best quality, you are supposed to follow certain settings.

For video settings, you will need to make video resolution at either 368×208 or 480×272. The video bit rate should be at 400, 512 or 768 kilo bits per second (Kbps). The frame rate should be at least 29.97 frames per second so there is no shuttering when playing video.

For the audio specification, it is almost a criterion selection. The sample rate should be at 24 KHz and the audio bit rate at 64, 96, 128 or 160 kbps.

And also, it provides a free tool for your movies to PSP transfer - PSP Video Manager, which can be handled more simply than iTunes did for iPod video transfer.

I would highly recommend downloading a PSP video conversion tool rather than use a generic video converter software to do the conversion as it is easier and you do not need to remember these technical parameters.

Downloading movies onto PSP is a lot easier when you use tools such as ImTOO PSP Video Converter. Now you can put movies on your PSP unlimitedly.

Everybody loves movies because they give us chances to experience various fancy lives of someone else we can just imagine in dreams. Most of them were DVD movies. DVD, whose main uses are video and data storage, is the popular optical disc storage media format. Since we are being satisfied with the benefits DVD brings to us, we are also bothered by its inconvenience, which is unportable. Fortunately, we had the iPod.

“iPod”, explained in the Wikipedia, “is a brand of portable media players designed and marketed by Apple and launched in October 2001.” All we know that watching music videos and TV programs on your iPod is all great and everything, but there is wondering left how we can put DVD movies on our iPod? Usually, that must be one reason many people buy a Video iPod – they think that they can watch DVD movies on their iPod video directly as they want. Wrong!

You can’t find out an option like “convert DVD to iPod format” on the iTunes interface. Maybe it seems silly, but it’s completely unsupported. You would think that after spent $299 or $399 on a video iPod, you would be able to put any kind of video on your iPod? Wrong either!

Before going any further, we are about to get some software that will help first. The software, generally called a ripper, will basically be ripping the movies from the DVD and converting it into a format which can be used by your iPod. There are sorts of programs on the market by manufacturers such as ImTOO and Xilisoft. Just Google what required, more information lists for you to select!

Let’s take Xilisoft DVD to iPod Converter as an instance. After program installation, I think less than 40 seconds is fast over my imagination. Tow options to upload your DVD folder or ISO folder: choose from the “File” menu or click the “Open DVD” or “Open ISO Files” icon directly on the interface. Select destination formats including almost all kinds of iPod video formats in the “Profile” box, and determine the location on your computer for the destination folder. After all, just one click “Start ripping”, you can get the DVD movies fit for your Video iPod.

The next, we need to transfer these DVD movies fit for iPod into our Video iPod. Of cause iTunes is a perfect choice, but there are some smart tools as well. I think you are supposed to take a opportunity to try “iPod rip” or “iPod to computer transfer”, they are amazing (the usability and the price)!

Now you see, just put a DVD to iPod in a few simple steps! I hope that was useful to you and will help you put your existing DVD movies onto your iPod, and if you’d like to be able to free download ipod tools, you can check up the link at the bottom of this article.