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.