Flexion.Org Blog» PS3 Archives – Flexion.Org Blog http://blog.flexion.org Bad grammar and typos for total strangers Sat, 20 Mar 2010 15:39:17 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Flexion.Org Blog http://www.flexion.org/gravatar.jpeg http://blog.flexion.org Bad grammar and typos for total strangers PS3, Mediatomb, Multi Zone Music streaming http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/09/26/ps3-mediatomb-multi-zone-music-streaming/ http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/09/26/ps3-mediatomb-multi-zone-music-streaming/#comments Sat, 26 Sep 2009 11:02:52 +0000 Martin http://blog.flexion.org/?p=275 PlayStation 3 firmware 3.00 added a new feature I was very excited about, multi-av output.

Today I finally got round to re-wiring the home cinema system to make use of this new feature. I now have the PS3 streaming music from Mediatomb with my A/V receiver sending audio to Zone 1 via digital inter connects and also sending audio to Zone 2 via analog stereo interconnects. Zone 1 is a 5.1 speaker setup and Zone 2 is a 2.0 all weather wireless speaker system which  are often in the kitchen but also moved outside for parties. We have a party today :-D

If Sony could just add Skype to the PS3 and allow the PSP Remote Play to output audio to both the PS3 and PSP (rather than just one of them) I would be very happy indeed.

]]> http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/09/26/ps3-mediatomb-multi-zone-music-streaming/feed/ 1 MKV to MPEG-4 conversion script http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/08/27/mkv-to-mp4-conversion-script/ http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/08/27/mkv-to-mp4-conversion-script/#comments Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:48:58 +0000 Martin http://blog.flexion.org/?p=264 The Play Station 3 can’t play MKV file. Therefore I’ve written a script that creates a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 compatible MPEG-4 from Matroska providing the video is H.264 and audio is AC3 or DTS. Xbox 360 compatibility requires that audio is forcibly downmixed to stereo with ‘–stereo’. AAC 5.1 audio will have the correct channel assignments when transcoding from AC3 5.1 and DTS 5.1. If ‘neroAacEnc’ is installed then it in preference to ‘faac’ for encoding the AAC audio as it produces better quality output. neroAacEnc is optional.

The script does as little re-encoding as possible, only the audio and subtitles are re-encoded or converted. The script can detect profile 5.1 H.264 and patch it to 4.1 in under a second. Any subtitles in the Matroska are preserved. If ‘mp4creator’ is used the subtitles are extracted stored in a seperate file. If ‘MP4Box’ is used (default) the subtitles are converted to GPAC Timed Text and muxed into the resulting
MPEG-4. The PS3 can’t display these subtitles but some software players can.

The script can optionally split the Matroska if it is greater than 4GB to ensure Play Station 3, Xbox 360 and FAT32 compatibility.

This script works on Ubuntu Linux and should work on any other Linux/Unix flavour and possibly Mac OS X providing you have the required tools installed.

]]> http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/08/27/mkv-to-mp4-conversion-script/feed/ 8 PlayStation 3 compaitble MPEG-4 container repacker http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/04/23/ps3-mpeg-4-container-repacker/ http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/04/23/ps3-mpeg-4-container-repacker/#comments Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:09:11 +0000 Martin http://blog.flexion.org/?p=253 Some of my mobile phones have been able to record video clips in MPEG-4 format. Sadly some of these clips don’t play on the PlayStation 3 and those that do stutter terribly. I use ‘iplayer-dl‘ to download content from BBC iPlayer. Sadly the files are in a Quicktime container and are not playable on the PS3. In order to address both these issues I created a script which extracts the audio and video from an existing MPEG-4 or ISO Media Apple QuickTime container and repacks them in a new MPEG-4 container with optional splitting of the resulting MPEG-4 to maintain FAT32  compatibility. The new MPEG-4 files play back just fine on my PS3 :-)

This script works on Ubuntu Linux, should work on any other Linux/Unix flavour and possibly Mac OS X providing you have the required tools installed.

  • See the Code section of my site for the download and more details.

Mp4-Repacker.sh was released on April 23rd 2009 to help celebrate St. George’s Day.

]]> http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/04/23/ps3-mpeg-4-container-repacker/feed/ 4 MKV to M2TS conversion script http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/04/23/mkv-m2ts-conversion-script/ http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/04/23/mkv-m2ts-conversion-script/#comments Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:00:46 +0000 Martin http://blog.flexion.org/?p=251 The Play Station 3 can’t play MKV file. Therefore I’ve written a script that creates a PlayStation 3 compatible M2TS from a MKV, assuming video is H.264 and audio is AC3 or DTS with as little re-encoding as possible. Any subtitles in the MKV are preserved in the M2TS although the PS3 can’t display subtitles in M2TS containers. Optionally splits the M2TS, if it is greater than 4GB, to maintain FAT32 compatibility. Unlike other MKV to M2TS solutions, this script doesn’t create any intermediate files during the conversion. The PS3 can’t play DTS audio streams in M2TS containers, therefore DTS audio is transcoded to AC3.

This script works on Ubuntu Linux, should work on any other Linux/Unix flavour and possibly Mac OS X providing you have the required tools installed.

  • See the Code section of my site for the download and more details.

MKV-to-M2TS.sh was released on April 23rd 2009 to help celebrate St. George’s Day.

]]> http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/04/23/mkv-m2ts-conversion-script/feed/ 16 Converting Matroska to M2TS for PS3 and Mediatomb http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/04/15/converting-matroska-mkv-m2ts-ps3-mediatomb/ http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/04/15/converting-matroska-mkv-m2ts-ps3-mediatomb/#comments Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:19:24 +0000 Martin http://blog.flexion.org/?p=225 It has been a while since I last posted, mainly due to not having Internet access at home for a month :-(

Anyway, I’m online again and I have been tinkering with various projects the most recent of which is Matroska conversion (again).  For sometime I have been converting Martoska files to MPEG-4 with AAC 5.1 audio so I can stream them via Mediatomb to my PS3. The conversion process works well although there is some overhead in transcoding the audio and the AAC 5.1 audio is not as good quality as the original AC3 or DTS. If you are interested I’ve posted my script which automates the whole process in the Code section of this site and you can find all the gory details on my Coverting MKV to MP4 wiki page.

A little while back I read it was possible to convert those same Matroska file to M2TS files which, so long as the audio is AC3, takes much less time to convert. As the PS3 can’t play DTS audio streams inside a M2TS container there is still a requirement to transcode DTS to Ac3. That said the conversion to M2TS requires less file I/O than converting to MPEG-4 and is therefore it is generally a quicker conversion method, typically just 2 or 3 minutes on my workstation at home. Plus the audio quality of the Ac3 or transcode DTS is better than that of transcoded AAC 5.1 :-)

I’ve created my own script to fully automate the conversion process. The script has been teston Ubuntu 81.0 64-bit but there is an outside chance it will work on Mac OS X if you can get the required tools installed. You can find my script and all the details on my Converting MKV to M2TS wiki page.

]]> http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/04/15/converting-matroska-mkv-m2ts-ps3-mediatomb/feed/ 2 Mediatomb 0.12 – Streaming audio and video around the house http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/02/07/mediatomb-012-streaming-audio-and-video-around-the-house/ http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/02/07/mediatomb-012-streaming-audio-and-video-around-the-house/#comments Sat, 07 Feb 2009 16:23:39 +0000 Martin http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/02/07/mediatomb-012-streaming-audio-and-video-around-the-house/ Mediatomb is an open source (GPL) UPnP MediaServer with a nice web user interface, it allows you to stream your digital media through your home network and listen to/watch it on a variety of UPnP compatible devices, such as the PS3 in my case. Mediatomb 0.12 is not yet released as final yet but it is certainly stable enough for general use, so I spent the last week migrating from Mediatomb 0.11 to Mediatomb 0.12. I have kept notes on how I setup Mediatomb 0.11 and Mediatomb 0.12 on my DLNA wiki page.

I’ve recently finished ripping my entire CD collection (344 CDs) to MP3 and I am currently ripping my DVD collection (85 done so far) to MP4 with AAC 5.1 audio. The ‘Music’ and ‘Video’ folders in our home directories are mounted via NFS. The Mediatomb server uses the same data sources so any playlists or new music/videos we might import are immediately reflected in Mediatomb :-)

Our entire CD library is now available at the click of a button, automatically organised by genre, artist and date. We have also created some playlists (in .m3u or .pls format). New to Mediatomb 0.12 is the abaility to scrobble your music to Last.fm, this a killer feature for me and why I choose to migrate to 0.12 before it goes final. I ripped the CDs using SoundJuicer, since I can configure it to use LAME presets. I then used the Music Brainz Picard Tagger to add additional tagging and embed cover art. Finally my wife and I use Banshee to manage the music library on our computers, including the creation of playlists and syncing to our iPods.

I am using Handbrake to rip the DVDs to MP4. I’ve created a new PS3 compatible profile which is focused on quality, I’ll post details about that in the future. Mediatomb 0.12 has some experimental features to stream video content from .ISO images of DVDs. I’ve yet to play with that but it sounds very cool. I’ve also create a script which queries IMDB to categorises our film library by genre and create summary information about each film in the library. I’ll be posting more about that soon.

I haven’t finalised how we will integrate Photo management with Mediatomb yet, but that is that final piece in the puzzle. If you have any cool import hacks for Mediatomb then I am all ears :-)

]]> http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/02/07/mediatomb-012-streaming-audio-and-video-around-the-house/feed/ 16 Converting DVB-T to DVD Compliant MPEG-2 http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/01/22/converting-dvb-t-to-dvd-compliant-mpeg-2/ http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/01/22/converting-dvb-t-to-dvd-compliant-mpeg-2/#comments Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:46:26 +0000 Martin http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/2009/01/22/converting-dvb-t-to-dvd-compliant-mpeg-2/ I am just about to clean up and convert another batch of programmes I have recorded from Freeview (DVB-T in the UK) so that I can add them to my DLNAServer. I thought I’d share the method I use on Ubuntu.

By clean up, I mean edit out any adverts and trim crap from the start and the end of the recordings. It just so happends that the result of this process is a DVD compliant MPEG-2 which is suitable for DVD authoring, or in my case, streaming around the house. This method of conversion should work for any DVB PVR which allows you to export recordings via USB and, of course, MythTV or similar.

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