First, I rip some of my DVDs to HDD to make it convenient to watch in Media Center. Problem is Media Center Extenders can't play ripped DVDs through Media Center. So if I want to stream a DVD movie to the 360 I have to transcode it to WMV. No problem for the type of movies I would do this with. Ones for my son to watch so the discs don't get messed up. I know how to do all this myself but I don't know what the optimal settings are for the WMV. I figure anything greater than 480 lines of horizontal resolution would be a waste. I figure audio quality is personal preferece, I would normally go with CD quality or better. But what about bit rate? What would be the best setting to generally use?

Next, I record TV shows through media center. I found a nice utility that strips the commercials out, helping reduce file sizes for shows I want to keep but I would also like to truncate the video length where it records part of the previous show and the next. When I search for programs that can crop the file I get results for cropping the image. Does anyone have a suggestion for a utility that can crop video files? I could use Windows Movie Maker but it seems excessive to use a program like that that will break the whole movie down to clips and then recompile the finished product.

For question 2, you want Doom9.org. I did a movie editing thing a couple years ago...I can't remember what the program was called, but I got it from doom9.

For the first problem, try playing it outside of the MC interface, in the normal video section. The 360 supports playing Divx files this way, as long as it fits a (albeit narrow) range of codecs on audio.

The first question is not so much a problem but, rather, what the best video settings would be for a DVD being converted to a video file. I think resolution and audio are easy choices but I don't know about bitrate and my guesses on search terms are too vague to get decent results.

Thanks for the help so far!