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.

I have noticed that the contrast levels on my Panasonic TH42-PHD8 plasma will suddenly increase during dark scenes and then drop back down to normal a fraction of a second later. This can be most distracting but as it only happens once or twice a week it hasn’t really bothered me.

But, I found a discussion at AVForums which describes how to enter the plasma service menu and fixed this behaviour. I am pleased to say it works perfectly Read me below…

• Panasonic Black Shift Problem/Solution