Converting everything to MPEG-4

[rbcp]

Earlier this month I bought an Xbox 360 and I love the multimedia capabilities of it.  I can stream music and pictures from other computers.  Today I played around with TVersity which allowed me to stream movies and TV shows from another computer.  I've been watching downloaded movies on my TV for years now, but it's always involved walking into another room, starting the movie on the computer, then coming back into the living room to watch it.  Pausing a movie requires the same steps.

Anyway, I bought a 500 gig external hard drive and I've hooked it up to the Xbox 360.  I'm able to watch any video files on it that are in the WMV or MP4 format.  And it sucks that I can't watch any format, such as Divx and MOV, but I don't care that much.  I just don't want to deal with networks and having to have another computer running, etc.  So my plan is to convert a few hundred gigs of movies into mpeg-4 format and hook them directly to the Xbox 360.  It'll be the most hassle-free way to watch movies once it's all done.

My question is, is this retarded?  Is there any downside to converting everything to .mp4 files?  Loss in quality or compatibility?  I noticed that the movie files I converted will still play on Windows Media Player and the quality seems exactly the same.  The file sizes are about the same.  And I found a free program that will batch convert my entire collection to mpeg-4 files.  Anyone want to talk me out of it before I go ahead with it?  Or does anyone have any better suggestions?

[Dark_Star_Academy]

no the quality should remain the same. ive done this before on my friends 360. the only other option i can think of is hard copying them to dvd.

[M-26-7]

Xbox live have?

[RijilV]

if you are converting from one codec to another you will be encoding all of the artifacts of the first codec with the second codec, while generating artifacts from the second.  If you are converting to a lower bitrate/resolution, you'll be further decreasing the quality.  You won't gain anything by increasing the resolution on the second codec (probably will make it worse), and increasing the bitrate on the second codec won't improve the video quality any, but it might reduce the amount of artifacts added by the second codec.

If you are converting from DVD you'll just be loosing whatever it is your codec does to the stream. 


On a side note, you can't stream MPEG-2?  You could just rip the DVDs and not compress them (any further than MPEG-2 is..).  500gig would hold about 120 movies.  factor in the cost of shipping and an enclosure, divide by the number of movies, you get a storage medium that costs about $1.20 per movie.

I dunno if that's worth it to you, would take much less time than re-encoding everything (how much is your time worth?)

[rbcp]

I dunno if that's worth it to you, would take much less time than re-encoding everything (how much is your time worth?)

It's not really much effort to do the encoding.  I just have to start the program and let it run for a few days in the background.  Encoding all my movies could take weeks, maybe months.  It's been running for a couple hours encoding season 1 of Freaks & Geeks now, and it's only about halfway done.  I like that they're compressed because I can fit more onto a drive.  At under a gig per movie, I can fit more than 500 movies on each drive.

I'm pretty happy with the quality so far.  I think most of my stuff is Divx now.  We just watched a movie on TV that I converted and didn't notice any difference at all.  Not like I have a giant plasma TV or anything.

[Raptor]

I compress everything to .mp4 for ipod, but you can try to torrent exclusively in Mp4 too,