Happy Friday

A few weeks ago I posted that my box was crapping out on me and locking up on boot up quite often.  Since the NXE it's been fine.  My guess is that the 1st update to prepare for NXE messed something up.  If that is indeed the case, its great news.  I don't really have the funds for a back up right now.  If my box died I'd be in quite the quandry.  I've begun to convert my media as well as the local video store's over to an external hard drive.  I also have the surround sound and everything else set up in the basement with the 360 as the dvd player.  I'll breathe a sign of relief, for now.

HANDBRAKE 9.3

The newest version of handbrake came out at the end of November.  It has quite a few more audio options and more apple presets.  One of the best new features is that it lets you encode/transcode any video file not just .VOB files.  It can output a ton of different video types now also: xvid, mp4, mv4, mkv etc.  I've been messing around trying to find the optimum settings for my fragile PC (P4 2.4ghz).  I qued up a few yesterday only to find out upon completion that I had somehow screwed up the sound.  I had surround sound noises but no voice channel.  Back to the drawing board.  I tried a few as low bit XVID, which only took about 3 hours to encode but had too many artifacts.  That leaves .264 which looks great but takes FOREVER.  I assume that I have the quality way too high because I started 300 last night and this morning it still had 20 hours left.  Oops.  I realize that I'm not making a great case for the program but it really is useful.

I don't remember if I ever got back to you guys about playing .264 files.  I did end up downloading Tversity which works like a charm.  The .264 vids with a bit rate of 1500-2000 look the same as the DVD and are a reasonable size.