Erik Anderson posted a couple weeks back about a prototype extender device playing DivX. supposedly the next wave of extenders come out this holiday, and at least one of those should have better codec support. i'm also hoping that competition might compel MS to get more codecs on the 360. but all we know so far (360 owners) is that we will be getting some level of MP4 support through MCE.

i've given up on on-the-fly transcoding. tried a handful of different transcoders, and too many things can go wrong : audio out of synch, might quit mid-show and then you cant skip back to that stop, limited random access, lower quality, etc...

instead, i've been re-encoding everything to supported (or soon-to-be supported) formats. for help with re-encoding, visit VideoHelp.com. still, with all the different containers and formats ... this has been a pain.

AVI/DIVX/XVID - not converting. been ripping my DVD collection for years, so i'll purchase whichever pika extender ends up supporting it. but i'm really hoping the 360 will get a fall update to support it ... to compete with the new extenders that'll be coming out.

MPG/MPEG - supported through MCE, although i'm using Nero Recode to convert large MPEG-2 files to smaller MP4 files.

WMV - already supported, although i have some WMV files that wont play. will probably 'fix' them by transcoding to MP4.

HD - using windows media encoder and Nero Recode to convert HD content to WMV-HD or MP4.

MP4/M4V - my new favorite format. had to use a program called YAMB to fix the container for a # of MP4 files to get them to play on the 360.

DVD - using Nero Recode to backup DVDs to MP4 now.

MOV/QT - purchased Quicktime Pro to rewrap some MOV files with an MP4 wrapper (without transcoding). also used it to export MOV files to MP4 (with transcoding).

OGM - used a great program called SUPER (recently updated) to batch process some of the files. it failed an one set, so i wrote a simple converter app with DirectShow to transcode to MP4.

RM/RMVB - used SUPER and my own program to transcode to MP4.

MKV - the audio got out of sync on the programs i tried, but my converter worked. my program still fails on some of these.

FLV - the quality on these are generally low, so i deleted them.

VOB/TS - used Nero Recode to transcode to MP4.

NSV - didnt want to install WinAmp, so i deleted them.

IVR - a new format from Real ... delete.

that'll leave me with AVI,MPG,MP4,WMV ... and i'll have gotten rid of MOV/OGM/MKV/RM/FLV/NSV/IVR. so this was a big pain in the butt, because there wasnt one tool that could handle it all. ultimately you want a tool that can convert between all formats, auto select the correct FPS and bit rate, batch processing, estimate what the size of the output will be, and provide progress info.