Help me transcode video for my PS3

April 10, 2013 10:59 AM

I've got home video in a number of formats that I'm trying to convert to play on my PS3. I have a Very Large NAS with integrated UPnP server (a version of Twonky), so I'm not looking for a new way to stream the data. I've got Handbrake 0.9.8 for OS X, which doesn't (appear to) have a preset for the PS3. I've dug around a little bit, but every set of settings I've found either results in data the PS3 won't read, or video that's more artifacted than I expected (common symptom - horizontal striping when things move). Anyone have a good set of parameters to transcode to something the PS3 can use?
posted by hanov3r to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Best answer: Google "ffmpeg ps3". The ffmpeg command line tool is the core of handbrake (and is somewhere inside the application package). I found this.
posted by smidgen at 11:14 AM on April 10, 2013

Best answer: PS3 Media Server has a pretty in-depth rundown of its transcoding settings in the program, so you can take a look at what it's doing and just use those settings on your setup instead of via PMS.
posted by griphus at 11:28 AM on April 10, 2013 [1 favorite]

Are you sure this is the route you want to go to play? Instead of transcoding, I would look at something like Plex, or even a Boxee box. Those can play a wide variety of media formats and you don't have all the transcoding fuss.
posted by unexpected at 11:43 AM on April 10, 2013

Seconding PS Media Server. No need for any transcoding, plays a lot of formats as long as your computer has the codecs.
posted by juiceCake at 12:22 PM on April 10, 2013

In the windows world, I've had much better luck with autogk than handbrake.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 1:04 PM on April 10, 2013

Response by poster: PS3 Media Server and Plex require a machine (dedicated or not) to serve up the video. I'd rather not leave a machine running all the time just to access those files when I've already got something ready to serve the media. Same with Boxee - additional hardware's just not in the cards now. I'll look at the PS3MS settings, though; thanks for that pointer, griphus!
posted by hanov3r at 1:09 PM on April 10, 2013

I don't know what I'm talking about, but a friend mentioned that the PS3 has a 4GB file size limit. 2 hours movies at 1080p are often over that size. Are you sure that's not what you're running into?
posted by cnc at 1:10 PM on April 10, 2013

Looking at my AVIs from my PS3 days, they all appear to be Xvid+MP3. I did transcode in those days, though.
posted by rhizome at 3:06 PM on April 10, 2013

I've asked this same question, and I've settled on PS3toVOB. It's fast, simple, does the job well for MKV files. The only problem is that it's not a one-step thing. First, you need to use MKVmerge to prep the file (there are tutorials online) which takes a minute or so, then run PS3toVOB, which maybe takes two to three minutes, and creates files that play on the PS3.

This isn't really a way of breaking files down to fit under the 4GB limit, just for switching MKV to a PS3 friendly format.
posted by Ghidorah at 11:07 PM on April 10, 2013

Response by poster: So, the ffmpeg post that smidgen linked to also talked about Handbrake_CLI, which does a much cleaner job (for some odd reason) than the GUI version, and I've been able to script up some conversions that look great. So, thanks, smidgen!
posted by hanov3r at 6:04 AM on April 11, 2013