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Who's been playing with the new xbox fall firmware?  I confirmed good divx playback over a thumbdrive, of an ordinary 700mb movie.  What i'm really interested in is real HD content though, 1080p, 5.1 or greater audio.

Supposedly it will play WMVHD up to 1080p now off of a DVD, but a dvd isn't very helpful when a movie in this quality can be 20+GB.  Anyone tried doing this off of a usb hard drive?  It'd have to be a relatively fast usb2.0 drive I suspect.

Most of my real HD stuff is in .mkv format, so I'm going to try to run an all night recode into WMVHD and give it a shot.  I assume wmencoder can do the recode lossless, we'll see. 

Following up....   WMVHD at 1080p with Dolby 5.1 (AC3) audio is working great.  

Unfortunately the xbox can't play x264 with multichannel audio, so I've got to reencode to WMVHD, which is a little tedious, but works well.

 
I demux the MKV file, and pull out the DTS audio if I have it, and quickly convert it over to Dolby (AC3).  Then I use tmpgenc to encode the x264 along with the Dolby audio to WMV, about 10000 bitrate, 1080p.

There is some minor quality loss, but I'm also ending up with slightly smaller files, I suspect if I wanted to make them larger I would lose less quality.  That being said, it is reasonably comparable to watching a bluray/hddvd directly, and superior to OTA HD broadcasts.