yeah, same experience here with 2005-07-31, so i switched back to 2005-07-17
bakman:
i'm convinced you should really stick to singlepass-divx3.11 don't get me wrong - xvid is great - but it's results are too damn good in this case, let me explain what i mean.
a perfect codec reaches a very high compression and quality by spending extra bitrate in allready complex (->high bitrate) scenes, thats what 2ndpass is for. but for the xbox with it's limited capabilities there's only one focus - the bitrate maximum - it can handle. so you want a simple codec wich never exceeds the <bitratelimit/perframe> and wich doesnt make complex scenes even more complex. meaning it's less important to care about the average bitrate, instead trying to enforce a strict perframe bitrate maximum (nandub's low-pass filter).
thats why singlepass will do the job in this case, creating a file wich is a bit less in quality, but playable and thats what counts - using xvid i was never able to keep frames from dropping.
so if you might wanna give nandub a try, the configuration parameters i mentioned can easyly be imported as a *.vcf file or setup by hand in sbc-settings. choosing 1280x720 as final resolution and cropping is all you need gordianknot for. save the *.avs file, open it with nandub, load the *.vcf, save avi - bingo (really that easy!
. its just one encoding pass and the quality is still great.
one more... check your source is 25fps, cause even having xbmc skipping frames it still lacks the power needed to process 29.97fps(ntsc) without frames beginning to drop. to play ntsc you might want to adjust resolution or framerate and sound to 25fps if the slowness doesnt bother you.