H.264/MPEG-4 on the Xbox 360
Most of the attention has been on the Windows Live Messenger support that will be added to the Xbox 360 during the next update (Spring Update, 7 May). But hidden (well not really) amongst the list of updates is the added support for H.264 video and MPEG-4 video:
- H.264 video support: Up to
15 Mbps10 Mbps, Baseline, Main, and High (up to level 4.1) Profiles with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles. - Added MPEG-4 Part 2 video support: Up to
8 Mbps5 Mbps, Simple Profile with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.
The H.264 support is fairly good, the 15 Mbps limit should be high enough for HD video. No multichannel audio is a shame though. MPEG-4 support is limited to SP (again no multichannel support). Better than nothing, I suppose. Still no DivX/XviD support, but at least it’s better than converting everything to WMV.
There are also a whole bunch of other video related improvements, such as improved skip forward/back (video is divided into 10 chapters automatically), switchable aspect ratios (Letterbox, Zoom, Stretch, Native). You can read the whole list here.
May 10th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
[…] on from my previous blog entry on Xbox 360 H.264 playback, I’ve finally had the chance to test it out when the Spring Update was released […]