Ripping Blu-Ray for Xbox 360 with Minimal Encoding

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What's the best way to rip a Blu-ray disc to an Xbox 360 compatible format, while preferably maintaining surround sound and as little video encoding as possible? As far as I can tell, the 360 technically supports both AVC and VC-1 (though if at those bit rates is questionable), so I'm kind of hoping that you could do it without actually re-encoding the video at all and, instead, just processing the audio and the re-muxing everything together in a new file.

Adam Haile

Posted 2009-12-08T01:31:48.157

Reputation: 876

It's gonna take a lot of space if you do it without encoding...we're talking 20-30 GB per movie. How much space does your Xbox 360 have? – davr – 2009-12-08T02:40:39.210

It could be even more than the 30gb, depending on how many layers the disc itself is. – Breakthrough – 2009-12-08T14:39:41.810

I wouldn't be storing it on the Xbox, but on a network media server with multiple Terabytes of storage... size doesn't really matter to me. – Adam Haile – 2009-12-09T03:00:16.153

note: there is also a legal aspect. converting an m2ts file (the Blu-Ray equivalent of a VOB) into an AVI or MKV or MP4 is fine, however, decrypting the disk (which you will have to do to get access to the source m2ts file in the first place) is not (at least not in the US, most European countries, Australia, etc.). – None – 2009-12-14T00:19:20.000

3@Molly Right, let's just call this a "hypothetical" question then. Or that my Blu-Ray discs are somehow magically unencrypted when I put them in my computer...no idea how that happens. – Adam Haile – 2009-12-14T01:02:05.557

Answers

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The Xbox 360 only supports MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264, or WMV. It also only supports up to 15Mbps bitrate. Blu-Ray movies are encoded at anywhere form 15Mbps to 40Mbps. That also depends on what codec the blu-ray is encoded in which could either be MPEG2, AVC, or VC-1. When you say the 360 supports AVC and VC-1 that is only when using them in a WMV file format. Any other format the Xbox supports is constrained to MPEG4/h.264. The easiest way to backup your blu-ray movies is to use something like DVDFab which will encode the movie to an HD, 360 compatible WMV. It won't look as good as the original movie but it can still be in 1080p with 5.1 surround sound.

Blu-Ray BitRates and Codecs

Xbox 360 Compatible Codecs

Juice

Posted 2009-12-08T01:31:48.157

Reputation: 944

Good point, but slight correction on the bit rate... According to the official FAQ ( http://support.xbox.com/support/en/us/nxe/gamesandmedia/movies/videofaq/viewvideoplaybackfaq.aspx#maxBitRate )

high bit rates are not blocked, but what they consider optimal. Granted, I realize that 40Mbps probably won't play... though I'd love to at least try. And I have tried a file that was encoded at 25Mbps and it worked fine.

– Adam Haile – 2009-12-14T01:07:39.067

Asked: 2009-12-08T01:31:48.157

Viewed: 955 times

Active: 2011-01-15T06:28:49.707