FFMPeg and the XBox 360

I've got a pile of old MPEGs on my PC from an old Sony camcorder of mine, that I wanted to play on my XBox 360. My XBox isn't connected to my home network, and I wanted to be able to convert the mpegs into something the XBox could read from an external drive.

I've been using Handbrake to do conversions, and it works. Handbrake is an excellent piece of software, but it isn't quite what I need, as I wanted to do batch conversions and the HandbrakeCLI is a little clunky and too slow for what I want.

I've been trying for ages to convert the files to .mp4 with ffmpeg, but the damn things just wouldn't play. I finally worked it out today. The mpegs have 5 channel Dolby audio - the XBox 360 doesn't support that. All I needed to do was restrict the audion channels to 2 on the output, and it worked! I haven't seen this anywhere on the web, so here goes:

ffmpeg.exe -i input.mpg -sameq -ac 2 -aspect 16:9 output.mp4

The -sameq tag forces the quality to be the same as the source. The -aspect is required for my files as the mpegs had a strange 2.34 aspect on them that made the resulting video play in a stretched mode (no idea why). The -ac 2 was the piece I was missing - this restricts the audio channels to 2, and my mp4 files now work on my XBox (which, incidentally, has the optional media pack applied). So now, I can just batch convert all my files to .mp4 using FFMPeg, which is REALLY fast, and I'm done.