about the 1080p flakeness..
I heard something about setting the fps on GOTsent to 25? to fix it.
Latest news on this issue, as I'd been suspecting: it's an Xbox 360 hardware or codec problem
as mentioned in this thread on Xbox-Scene:
Basically, if the decode buffer gets any larger than 12mb then the file will show up pixelated on the 360. If you have a PS3 nearby, you can try the same file and it will probably just show a black screen. So more than likely even if the bitrate is low enough there are probably too many reference frames in the file causing the buffer to be to large for the 360 to handle. Only option is to re-encode.
This info comes straight from Sentry23 (the creator of GotSent). I had problem files as you describe and that's what he told me was the problem.
This ties in with a long-standing suspicion I've had: since the Xbox 360 has
on-die graphics RAM of 10MB, it's likely the decoder is using this to hardware accelerate the process. As a result, if the framebuffer gets too big... wham, pixelation. The problem would only be exacerbated by 1080p files.
So, changing FPS might drop the framebuffer size to something reasonable and resolve this issue indirectly, but then you'd have to sync the audio to match... and I already have enough trouble trying to get things synchronized.
