Argh...Can't get videos to show up. Please help!

[Hookem]

Hi,

I have spent a ridiculous amount of time this past week trying to narrow down an issue I'm having between my XBOX 360 and an XP MediaSmart. After hours on the phone between XBOX and HP it appears my problem may be with the media server.

I captured video from my HD camcorder which resulted in 30 clips of .m2t video. I then converted them all to H.264 format using a program called Format Factory for 1280 x 720 (DivX) video at 30 fps resulting in .mp4 videos, the top specs listed by Microsoft for the 360. I spent a lot of time capturing test video to different formats to see which format would result in the best quality by watching them stream to the 360. Then I kicked off the huge encoding process for the whole tape and let it run.

I copied the final versions onto the Twonky media server share videos folder to stream to my 360. Up to this point everything is good.

But for some reason some of the videos are randomly not showing up in the video list on the server. It appears to be random. Out of 30 clips, numbers 7,9,15,21, and 23 just did not appear. I read where someone suggested changing the extension to .avi. I did that and OTHER clips disappeared. After changing clip 9 to .avi then clip 10 disappeared. I hadn't even altered that one.

This is driving me crazy. If anyone has any idea what's going on here please let me know. There are just too many variables here between all hardware and software components that I'm having a difficult time narrowing it down.

Do I need to use another format for the 360?
Are the formats correct but a software bug in TwonkyMedia?
Is there a scan setting on the HP MediaSmart that needs to be changed?

Thanks ahead of time

[mgillespie]

Xbox 360 format and standards support is patchy at best. It's not DLNA compliant (or UPnP) and it's very picky about what it plays... I'm pretty sure that's where your problems are...

[Hookem]

Thanks, wasn't sure what DLNA was so I did a little bit more research.

Are there any ways to test different components of this setup to at least find out which side is failing? Normally I'd use test devices at different points to verify what is actually being sent and received (for other technology), but I know very little about video and streaming servers. Is there a client I could install on one of my other computers that will simulate a client like the 360? At least that way I could see if the test client is capable of reading the file information.

The only difference that seemed to appear between the files that would appear and the ones that wouldn't are the sizes. This wasn't completely consistent, but the larger files tended to not be seen at a much higher rate.