I have had a 1000 model for years but now that I have a HD TV I thought I'd get the HD version. The thing is that everyone on the web is using .mkv for HD and I don't think the Showcenter works with this. How does everyone else watch HD on the Showcenter?

I transcode anything that isn't Showcenter-compatible (e.g. .mkv, .ogg, etc.) to an xvid AVI file.

In many cases, the actual video and audio in those files are compatible (e.g. the video is xvid or divx), and all I end up doing is repackaging the streams into an AVI file.

I personally use mencoder under Linux to do my transcoding (I'm running my Showcenter 200 using a Linux server instead of using the Pinnacle software, and I transcode on the same machine that I'm using to serve the content).  If you're using a Windows box, you can use mencoder or any number of Windows encoding tools.

BittMann

Thanks for the reply bittman. I have spent many an hour trying to get an application to convert .mkv to .avi and even when I have been successfull and it plays on the PC, I have never managed to get it to work on the Showcenter.

Don't know why that would be...unless the "avi" that's being created is somehow still not supported by the Showcenter, of course.

For example, here's a script that I used under Linux to convert a batch of Ogg media files of various "people doing stupid things" clips to Showcener spec.  These files contained Showcenter-compatible xvid video + vorbis audio -- I simply copied the video while transcoding the audio to something that the Showcenter would like, the result being a file containing (unchanged) xvid video and low-fidelity mp3 audio:

 find . -name '*.ogm' -exec mencoder -mc 0 -o '/junk/video/{}'.avi -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=64 -ovc copy -ffourcc DIVX '{}' \; &

In a nutshell:

"For every .ogm file in the current directory tree, run mencoder, ignoring timing errors (the -mc 0 bit), outputting to the "/junk/video" directory, with 64kbit/sec mp3 audio, copied video, forcing the fourcc to claim that it's DIVX."

If I had to re-encode the video (let's say that the video is simply not Showcenter-compatible, no way, no how), I do something like this:

find . -name '*.ogm' -exec mencoder -mc 0 -o '/junk/video/{}'.avi -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=64 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=1:vbitrate=1200 -ffourcc DIVX '{}' \; &

which does the same as the above, but reencodes (in this case, using lavc at 1200kbit/sec mpeg4) to "reasonable", if not stellar, quality.

Have you tried using Super Video Encoder using your .mkv file as input and creating a Divx output file.   Easy and very flexible encoder.   More info can be found at http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html