Q: I want to rip my dvds to a portable hard drive so i can then watch them on my xbox 360 when i connect it to the portable hard drive. What format should i rip my dvds to? .avi? .wmv? .mp4?
A: I believe the Xbox 360 supports .wmv, .avi, h.264, and MPEG 2. I would recommend .avi because it will work with pretty much anything (by anything, I mean other media devices). And although the Xbox was made originally to play only WMVs it now fully supports .avi. BUT, just so you know, an external hard drive needs to be formatted to FAT32 before the Xbox can detect it and even then it is only limited use but you can watch movies off it. If your rip the DVD to .avi, the Xbox will also support 5.1 DD if the DVD is 5.1 and you correctly ripped it. If your external hard drive isn't formatted to FAT32, use a flash drive or stream it from your computer using TVersity which is an excellent piece of media sharing software found at www.tversity.com