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

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.