H.264 to xvid?

Hello everyone.
I'm a bit of a media noob. I recently downloaded some TV episodes of a show that are in the .mkv container, compressed with h.264 for the video and AAC for the audio.
That's cool, they play fine with VLC and look great. The problem is that I still use an original xbox with xbmc to watch things on my TV. Apparently the h.264 compression is a bit much for that machine. The videos will play, but really slow. I don't hear much for the audio either, but it might because of the slowdown.
My question: is there a simple way to convert these over to xvid? I don't care about filesize going up, and I don't really care about loss in quality. The .mkv container should be fine, as long it can contain xvid? I dunno.
I started to research it on my own, and I got a lot of people talking about windows programs, and a lot of stuff I don't know a ton about.
Is this process even worth doing? Or should I just find a better source?
Thanks!

cschep wrote:Thanks guys. I guess I was curious because I didn't see how the 2nd pass could use any data from the 1st pass if there was no output file. It must store something somewhere right? Or am I just confused about how video encoding works?
It outputs it's finding to a log file in the current directory which will be used for the second pass. This is the same data that would have been used to do the compression for single pass. The second pass works better because the encoder now knows more about where the most detail is so it can use less compression there, and where the least detail is so it can use more. This technique works best for encoders that don't do the highest quality encoding the first time through. This includes xvid and most mpeg2 encoders. Some encoders like x264 when set up properly won't really gain much if any help from multiple passes.
I should have mentioned this before. For higher quality output when lowering the bit rate, it's best to use the same codecs as before. Conversions from lossy formats to other lossy formats (m4a-->mp3) reduces quality by huge amounts. Reducing the bit rate in the same format is far less destructive.
I also forgot to mention that the greatest place in the Universe to get answers about all of this stuff is:
http://forum.doom9.org/
Last edited by skottish (2008-10-03 18:08:31)

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Last edited by REN (2010-02-14 14:45:00)

this the output from 2 diferent kinds of video. Both Don't play very well unless I restart my computer...
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MPlayer SVN-r30526-4.4.3 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team
142 audio & 332 video codecs
mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
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AVI file format detected.
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[vdpau] Error when calling vdp_device_create_x11: 1
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
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==========================================================================
==========================================================================
Opening audio decoder: [mp3lib] MPEG layer-2, layer-3
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Selected audio codec: [mp3] afm: mp3lib (mp3lib MPEG layer-2, layer-3)
==========================================================================
AO: [oss] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
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MPlayer SVN-r30526-4.4.3 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team
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minor_version: 1
compatible_brands: isom
[vdpau] Error when calling vdp_device_create_x11: 1
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Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
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==========================================================================
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A: 3.0 V: 2.4 A-V: 0.565 ct: -0.059 0/ 0 105% 16% 3.8% 50 0
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A: 10.3 V: 8.9 A-V: 1.353 ct: -0.060 0/ 0 95% 12% 3.5% 198 0
===== PAUSE =====
Exiting... (Quit)
Well I really don't think my system is too slow to play this. I use to play video with higher resolution (720p) very well.
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Converting XviD movies for iTunes

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A 50MB 4 minute XviD clip exported to a 140MB Quicktime movie.
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