Regular readers (if they’re out there) will have to excuse today’s post, it’s sadly much geekier than usual and more informative than anything. I use my 360 to stream video files to my TV over my wireless network and since the big dashboard update last Autumn it’s been possible to stream avi files encoded in divx or xvid formats. Recently I’ve had a problem though where some videos would play audio but no picture, just a black screen, and sometimes it would be impossible to get response from the controller. So here’s a fix for that problem – which it seems only occurs over a VGA connection – in the hope that google finds and indexes it and it helps other people in the same situation.
- Connect your Xbox 360 to the TV with Component cables instead of the VGA lead.
- Go to the Settings blade on the dashboard, then to Console Settings and then Video Settings.
- Choose a different resolution to the currently selected one. e.g. if you’re currently using 720p, change it to 480p or 1080i.
- The console will change the resolution and ask you if you want to keep the changes. Once you say yes to this it will try to do a 50Hz test, and ask you if it displayed correctly. It will display correctly, but you need to choose NO at this point.
- Save the settings, turn the console off and reconnect it with the VGA lead.
- Your videos should now play back with picture and sound.
It seems the problem is isolated to PAL machines running over VGA, and it doesn’t seem to like displaying the video at 50Hz. By telling the console that the 50Hz test failed it forces it to use 60Hz instead, which works perfectly. So far this has solved all of my own problems and means I no longer have to re-encode with a different codec, or convert and burn DVDs. I hope it helps someone out there!