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.

• MKV-to-MP4

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.

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.

I have finally got around to re-activating this website after many months of neglect

The first thing to do was move away from Jaws. Sadly, my Jaws installation is broken in a way that newer Jaws releases plain refuse to upgrade it. So, I did some research and decided to migrate to WordPress since it caters for all the essentials I require either in the core functionality or via plugins. Plus I can integrate with some other stuff I want to use.

My migration to WordPress was made all the easier thanks to the excellent Jaws import plugin I found on the WordPress trac. However, I decided not to use the Textile plugin to preserve the Jaws formatted text. Instead I chose to manually clean up some of the old entries so I could stick with the TinyMCE editor long term

I am happy with WordPress thus far and look forward to getting some plugins going and picking up a new theme over the coming days and weeks.