If you follow my blog at all you’ll know that really love Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition. I’m using it on all my televisions and most recently with my XBox 360 (which is finally back from repair). One of the great things about my system is that I have access to all the television shows that I’ve converted to DivX from any TV in the house – any TV except the one my XBox is connected to. See the issue is that the XBox 360 can’t play DivX files.

Well that’s not entirely true. You can use this great little app, Transcode 360 to convert your DivX files (actually a huge list of files) to MPEGII and stream them to your XBox. The problem with that is you have to go through extra steps, about 30-45 seconds worth, to get the files to play. Not very wife friendly and not very me friendly for that matter. So while I’ve been using that solution for a while now I wanted to figure out a solution that was easier/faster when I just want to throw on an old episode of Cheers while we’re eating dinner. WinAVI to the rescue.

I’d been looking for an app that would do the following for me for quite a while:

• Convert from DivX to WMV
• Convert them at 100% quality (or very near to 100%)
• Keep the AC3 audio track (for my movies if I did this)
• Allow for batch encoding
• Be fast and easy to use

With WinAVI I’ve found almost all of that. While I haven’t tested the AC3 stuff with it it does everything I need. I can setup a batch job (not super easy to do but it can do it) to convert as many files as I want. I’ve had 3 machines at home converting files 24/7 for about a week now (yes, I’m crazy). So far it takes about 12 hours to convert an entire season of a show so while it’ll take me a while when I’m done all these files will play perfectly on my XBox (and of course on my PC’s) without me needing to transcode them. My WAF (wife acceptance factor) is now very high Highly recommended