HomePage 2 of 2: Using GOTSent
Step 3: Using GOTSent
Once GOTSent is started, it should look like the following.
There's not a lot of options, so we'll just quick go through everything. For the "Sourcefile", this is where you load in your input MKV files. You can either use the "File" button to load in a single file, or use the "Folder" button to specify the folder containing your multiple MKV files for batch conversion. The "Output folder" is the output location of your MP4 file.
The "Priority" option lets you specify the CPU usage priority. Setting it to "Low" will make GOTSent run in the background whenever the CPU is free. Setting it to "High" will make it run ahead of other programs. You would normally set this to "Low".
The "Target" specifies whether you want the output MP4 file to be compatible with the Xbox 360, PS3 or PS3 with 5.1 channel audio. This guide only covers Xbox 360 compatibility, so select "Xbox 360" here.
The "Subtitles" section allows you to load in a subtitle file, in which the subtitles will be embedded into the video. If your input MKV file has multiple audio tracks, you can select which one you want to include in the output MP4 (only one audio track can be selected to play for the MP4 file on the Xbox 360). The "Normalize audio" options will average out the high and low volume parts of the audio, which The "AC3Filter Options" button allows you to change the AC3Filter options, but that's mostly unnecessary.
The "Safe Sync" option, when enabled, will decode the AC3 audio in the MKV file using ffmpeg to try to avoid sync issues. 25 FPS output will increase the framerate of your typical 23.976 FPS movie so it plays smoothly on 720p50 displays. It's highly recommended that you do not enable this option, as framerate conversion is always likely to introduce audio sync issues and this "PAL Speedup" is something best avoided.
Now we get to the important part. The "Re-encode to" option determines whether you want GOTSent to re-encode or transcode the video to a Xbox 360 friendly format. Remember back to step 1, if your MKV file did not contain a H.264/AVC video stream, then the re-encoding checkbox will have been automatically checked, and most likely, the re-encode setting will be set to XviD as your input file is most likely using DivX/XviD conversion. If so, then you should leave this setting as it is, although you could select "H264" or "H264 (HQ)" as the transcoding format to maintain the same quality but probably decrease the file size slightly ("H264 (HQ)" should give you slightly better re-encoding quality, but at the cost of longer encoding times - remember that any transcoding will mean a quality loss).
If in step 1 you found that your MKV file contained an H.264/AVC video stream, then if it was Level 4.1 or lower, then you can leave the re-encoding option box unchecked to skip transcoding. We should avoid re-encoding if possible, as any re-encoding will always mean a quality loss. If you didn't re-encode and the resulting MP4 file did not play back properly, then you can come back here and re-enable the re-encode option. If however your H.264/AVC stream had a Level higher than 4.1, then you'll need to enable the re-encode option and select "H264" or "H264 (HQ)" ("H264 (HQ)" should give you slightly better re-encoding quality, but at the cost of longer encoding times).
The last few options are "Split > 4GB ?" - this is needed mainly for the PS3 or for storage on FAT32 hard-drives. For the record, the Xbox 360 does play MP4 files larger than 4GB. The "Fit to" option is the only option in GOTSent that allows you to specify the output file size - here you can select DVD-5, DVD-9 or Blu-ray file sizes, and the encoder will try to fit the resulting file within this file size limit. Note that you will need to be re-encoding in order for this option to be used. And lastly, the "Shutdown after conversion" option will shutdown your entire system after it finishes encoding, either the single file input or all the files in the folder input method.
All that's left to do now is to press the big "Convert" button near the bottom to start the process. Some windows may pop up, and when the process is finished, the status box just above the button should display "Conversion done".
And we're done 
.
Now all you have to do is to take your new MP4 file and get it to play on the Xbox 360. You can do this in various ways, such as through a USB drive, or use a software like TVersity to stream the MP4 file from your computer to your Xbox 360 (instructions for doing this are here.
Got more questions? Post them in our MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) Forum and get them answered by other expert users.
1 2 