Monday, April 12, 2010

Xbox 360 MP4 settings

So you're using your Xbox 360 as a media center frontend or just trying to play an MPEG-4 (.MP4) file but the 360 keeps giving you 1 of 2 errors everytime. The two errors (whose codes are too long for me to look up and type here) pertain to 1 of 2 things: too big of a file size (greater than 4GB) or AAC audio with more than 2 channels at a bitrate higher than 128kbps -- AC3 audio in an MP4 container is not part of the MPEG-4 standard!

The following settings work for playing .MP4 files on the Xbox 360.

File size:
The end file size must be less than 4GB: not 4GB, less than 4GB.

Audio codec:
AAC Stereo @128kbps or less, no VBR.
No AC3, no Dolby Pro Logic II, no AAC 6 Channel Discrete!

Video codec:
AVC/H.264 (video bitrate does not seem to be an issue)