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[DaveP]

I have just downloaded Media Center to use it as a home video and music server - and I need some advice.

I want my kids to be able to watch movies on their PCs on the home network, by choosing from videos on a server.  It looks like Media Center will do this, but I have 2 questions:

1. What is the best format for me to use to store the movies? - I have played around with DivX pro, but am having problems getting high quality (It's OK, but not perfect).  Size isn't too much of an issue, but some compression would be nice (say, 2GB per movie).  If I could get DivX really good, that would be OK.

2. The widescreen format of the movies is not good for the PC screens, so I want to find a way of having the player crop the edges to fit to screen height while maintaining aspect ratio during play time - I don't want to crop during encode (permanent!) as that won't work when I play it back on a Widescreen TV.

Any help would be appreciated.

[NoCodeUK]

Not sure about 1 but aspect ratio options are available in MCs right click menu when a video is playing...

Adam

[sraymond]

Concerning 1:  DivX and Xvid are pretty much the standard codecs to use for video.  I've gotten quite acceptable results with a target filesize of 700 MB when compressing DVDs.  It's certainly a bit of an art, but you can learn a lot by frequenting websites that cater to "rippers".  I suggest http://www.afterdawn.com/articles/ as a start - item 2 contains the divx guides.  Don't overlook the audio compression - as PCM just won't do it!

Scott-

[DaveP]

Thanks guys.

I don't think the different aspect ratios do the job Iam hoping for, as they distort the image rather than cropping to fit the screen.

As far as DivX is concerned, I guess I need to play with it some more and check out more guides.

Dave