Try looking at this:
http://sentry23.googlepages.com/

easiest method is to render them as WMV -HD under the streaming category that what am using on my xbox from pd7 and it works like a charm.

Quote: easiest method is to render them as WMV -HD under the streaming category that what am using on my xbox from pd7 and it works like a charm.

Thanks for that, just given it a try and it seems to do the trick (it does take a rather long time to convert a 1 hour recording though (3.5 hours roughly) but I can live with that.

I'm having to use the "Windows Media Video 9 HD Standard Quality" and not high quality as the high quality creates some buffering issues over the wireless network.

I tried various other tools to do the conversion but they never seemed to want to render the (widescreen) source into a widescreen wmv file.

yea thats the setting i convert in to becuase the wmv hd high setting creates the video at the 1440 setting which isnt that good if you shot your video at 1920 resolution. atleast with the standard resolution you get 720p rez.

heres a question for the cybelink team:

why cant we adjust the bitrate for the WMV-HD codec ? we are only confined to 6bits for standard and 8bit for high setting but with the 1440 resolution ?

what spec computer u have that it takes 3/5 hrs for a 1hr footage ?

The camera is recording in 1080i and I'm, converting using the "Windows Media Video 9 HD Standard Quality" setting.

I'm importing from the camera and immediately producing the output with no editing.

The source file is approx 10Gb and the final output file is roughly 2.5Gb.

My PC is a Q6600 quad core with 4Gb RAM running Vista premium 64bit. I am also using 2 SATA 2 drives.

How long should the conversion be taking.

Even my PD7 takes about 6 mins to load up (I've contacted support and followed all their instructions but it still takes forever to load). Everything else on he PC runs nice and fast as expected.

well am pretty sure it isnt suppose to take that long to load up pd7, heres a question is pd7 completly vista 64bit compatable. becuase am using regual xp pro 32bit on an older 2.2 athlon 64bit cpu and it doesnt take that long to load up the program.

mayb one of the admins can assit you on that i think they have a couple of instructions on the forums on how to address that problem i know i read this pd7 taking long to load up before on the threads here.

I've just had a quick search and found someone else with a similar problem. Their solution was

"just in case anyone runs into this again, just right click the shortcut and click properties, click compatibility tab and force it to run in windows xp sp2 mode and it starts up just fine"

This seems to do the job so it looks like there's a compatibility issue somewhere.

That's the load time sorted out (from 6+ minutes to mere seconds). Now I need to sort out the 'produce' time. It's still 3 hours for a 1 hour recording (reduced from 3.5 hours though).

Trying different output formats (that probably won't work with the xbox).

Mpeg 4 : 1hour 30 mins produce time
Dv-AVI : 30 mins produce time

All different attempts use the same input file (1 hour 1080i)

problem with the mpeg4 they have here is that it generates a m2ts which is totally useless on most players including xbox. still waiting for them to patch it so that you can generate an actual mp4 file which the xbox gladly supports.

I've tried all sorts of different programs to create the files that I want and so far, by far the best (and quickest/easiest) is Windows Movie Maker.

I can create a 1080p or 720p file and they both play on the Xbox 360 (wirelessly connected) without any buffering whereas every other software I've tried either creates unplayable files are ones that create buffering issues all the time.