Comments on: How to convert MKV to M4V for easy XBOX 360 streaming from Mac OSX

By: Jeff’s Blog » Converting a .mkv to .mp4, & watching it on an Xbox 360

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:43:35 +0000

[...] I started out by looking at the video and audio tracks of the Matroska file with Mediainfo Mac. I discovered that the video track was standard .h264, while the audio was Dolby Digital (DTS). I didn’t want to have to re-encode the video (and loose additional quality) during the conversion to .mp4, so I threw out some common tools like Handbrake, in order to focus on tools that offered video pass through. One option is to use Quicktime 7 Pro to pass-through the video to a .mov file (which the Xbox should play). The audio track, however, becomes a problem, because you can’t passthrough DTS audio to a .mp4 file or .mov file (you must re-encode as AAC, and loose the Dolby). This also doesn’t solve problem two (the size issue). For more on using Quicktime 7 Pro for this task, & streaming via the excellent Connect 360 tool (which I didn’t want to do), check out this tutorial. [...]

By: nzcoops

nzcoops — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:15:47 +0000

I followed everything in the video, and it seems to play on the new dashboard well. I haven’t watch enough to check for OOS issues, but they can even be in the original .mkv file.

I really appreciated this simple clear guide, I spent a fair while searching, best .mkv to 360 streaming on mac option I found by a long shot.

By: raseri

raseri — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 02:59:55 +0000

I have successfully created the file but it does not play on the 360, it shows up just does not play. Please Help!

By: raseri

raseri — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 02:35:45 +0000

if you are unable to select pass through check your setting for File Format at the top, it should be on MP4, not MP4 (ISMA).

By: raseri

raseri — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:56:43 +0000

I was unable to select pass through as well, the file info showed the H264 codec though, confused. I stopped the export and when I reopened file it did not allow me to export, wierd. I will try w/ another .mkv file.

By: Nate

Nate — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 21:14:53 +0000

I was able to get one video to “pass through” fine but I’m having a problem with another and it’s not letting me select pass through from the pulldown menu. Any thoughts??

By: Confused

Confused — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 04:22:57 +0000

I did this but the audio is out of sync. why is that?

By: Marcelo

Marcelo — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 04:14:00 +0000

Update:

I haven’t been able to get a single movie to play on my 360 using this method.

By: Marcelo

Marcelo — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 01:50:29 +0000

I had a problem. My video is H.264 but for some reason I can’t do the pass-through encoding. The option is greyed out. Any thoughts on this?

Thank you!

By: eple

eple — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:46:02 +0000

Thanks a lot!
For those who failed, you may try using ffmpegX and WMV…
Anyway, it’s a very cool guide