PS3 Video Server, Media Server Preliminary Setup and Tests

[SteveCallas]

Call me the party pooper, but I'm curious, what is the actual benefit here? If you are already having to turn on your PS3, the external hard drive, and sort through some folders to find the movie you want - then on top of that are dealing with potential compression, having the PS3 do the upconversion (reviews of which I have seen say it isn't exactly the greatest at), and losing menu navigation for special features - why not just manually put a disk in a dvd player?

[bob1029]

You know... for the ps3 this doesnt make too much sense... I mean maybe for certain content, such as tv shows and anime, it would be beneficial, but with dvds its probably best to just put them in as needed. Im probably going to start a new thread though, as this could be applied more reasonably to a htpc and allow for the creation of an inexpensive dvd jukebox system.

[wbassett]

SteveCallas wrote:

Call me the party pooper, but I'm curious, what is the actual benefit here? If you are already having to turn on your PS3, the external hard drive, and sort through some folders to find the movie you want - then on top of that are dealing with potential compression, having the PS3 do the upconversion (reviews of which I have seen say it isn't exactly the greatest at), and losing menu navigation for special features - why not just manually put a disk in a dvd player?

Depending on the review I guess... like anything, some say great things, others not so great things, and I have pretty much seen that about any piece of gear.

To me it's a matter of convenience. The USB hard drive powers up and down when the PS3 is turned on or off so that's really not a factor at all. Actually everything comes on with the push of one button on one remote. In my opinion it's faster than sorting through discs and getting up to change out discs. As far as folders, it's not like everything is in one folder and you have to search through a couple hundred movies to find one, The Bond flicks are all in a Bond folder and each movie is named, i.e. Dr. No is named Dr. No... and so on...

The video quality the way I did it is exactly the same as the DVD video quality since it is using the original VOB file and just renaming it. Most of the movies actually didn't need any compression and those that did it was very slight. For the ones that need nothing other than renaming the VOD file, it is the same as watching the DVD. I guess to some any compression would be a negative factor, but I honestly cannot see the difference in playback quality and I am pretty picky about compression artifacts and degraded PQ.

The appeal, at least to me is to be able to access movies, CDs, photos... pretty much anything I feel like watching or doing and have it right there with instantaneous playback at the push of a button.

I guess this may not be a topic for everyone, but I'm sure some are very interested in utilizing their PS3 as a full blown media server. It's probably one of those things that a person is either interested in or not, no harm no foul.

[wbassett]

bob1029 wrote:

You know... for the ps3 this doesnt make too much sense... I mean maybe for certain content, such as tv shows and anime, it would be beneficial, but with dvds its probably best to just put them in as needed. Im probably going to start a new thread though, as this could be applied more reasonably to a htpc and allow for the creation of an inexpensive dvd jukebox system.

That depends... if a person already has a PS3 it makes perfect sense to utilize all of its features and capabilities. For someone that is looking for a Bluray player and also interested in an HTPC, but doesn't have an HTPC already, it also is a great option to at least check into. For those that already have an HTPC... yeah I'd say it probably doesn't make sense.

To build an HTPC with the same horse power as well as BD playback capability is a bit of a daunting task, and not possible for $699. HDMI video cards are starting to show up more and more, but they are not a main stream item yet, and those that are out there are not all HDCP compliant. Adding an internal BD drive to an HTPC will cost almost the same price as the PS3 (and the rumor is the price on the PS3 is coming down). Also a person can pick up a 1 terabyte USB/1394 Firewire My Book for $352 with free shipping from Amazon, so the cost factor really isn't that much either. (The My Book drive will of course also work with any HTPC, it's not just a PS3 peripheral). The 1TB My Book can also be configured as a raid setup, if data integrity is a concern.

I have nothing against HTPCs, I wanted to show some of the untapped potential of the PS3 is all, and I firmly believe it has even more potential that hasn't even been discovered yet. If they drop the price to $499 for the 60GB version, the only thing I can say that would be a drawback is the TRUEHD analog out that some people demand, but seeing that more and more receivers are starting to support uncompressed PCM over HDMI, the desire for dedicated analog out may start to wane some.

Another coolness factor and feature that you may even like bob is you can still use your PC and stream the movies directly to the PS3 and in turn to your HDTV in 1080p resolution or upconverted to 1080p. In my situation an HTPC really isn't practical as a medial server because my HDTV's VGA input doesn't support 1080 resolution. I suppose I could get an HDMI switcher, or run an HDCP compliant HDMI video card from the PC through a receiver, but why go to all that trouble when I can just hit the power button on the remote of the PS3 and already have access to a movie archive on as many external drives as I wish to add? To some, both ideas (HTPC or a PS3 Media Server) may sound like a total waste of time, to others either method may be just what they are looking for. If you ask me it's no stranger than Sony's 400 disc DVD changer that's out there.

I am not arguing in any way at all. You did say:

bob1029 wrote:

You know... for the ps3 this doesnt make too much sense...

and I was just showing an alternate point of view and thoughts.

I really would love to see a tutorial on your preferred DVD to media server method, but if you want to do it in another thread that's fine and I do look forward to reading it and giving it a whirl. All the same principles you are doing should apply here as well so I definitely want to see other options, opinions, and points of view!

[wbassett]

Oh Steve... maybe this will make more sense to you...

We dropped cable, satellite, all of it back in November of 2004. All we watch are DVDs exclusively... TV shows on DVD, movies, concerts, HD DVD, BD... so in the course of a week that is a lot of disc swapping!

My wife is actually getting into the one click concept, and WAF is always a big factor in any HT/Entertainment room setup. She complains about too many remotes now as is so she likes things being consolidated down this way. Plus I think it kind of gives her the feel of TV (without the commercials of course) without having to actually bother with cable or satellite. It's not that we can't afford cable, we just really dislike the bad programming and commercials that much. Besides, the money we save on cable pays for an awful lot of DVDs!

We've literally burnt out DVD drive transports from the amount of use they get, and I'll admit, if anyone is going to burn out a hard drive it will probably be us. Personally I don't want to see that happen, but I'd rather burn out a hard drive than the transport in my HD DVD player or BD player if you know what I mean.

[bob1029]

No matter which way you look at this, you are talking alot of tedious work to get an entire collection stored on hdds. Without compression, you could probably do it in about 800 hours. If we are talking compression, you are looking at upwards of 3000 hours. This does not even take into account highdef content. Unless im mistaken, the only way to rip a bluray movie (without a pc bdrom) is to install a linux distro on the ps3 and use the dd command to dump an iso. So basically you are looking at a solid month of swapping dvds and ripping discs. The process could possibly be accelerated with multiple dvd readers, but the external harddrives can only write fast enough for 2 simultaneous rips (assuming 8x). I suppose you could make a point to rip a movie before watching it...

Also, can the ps3 read a video_ts folder directly?

[wbassett]

No the PS3 doesn't read from the video_ts folder, hence the reason to rename the files from VOB to .mpeg. If it did that would be even easier and just require moving all the files, .BUP and .IFO, to one folder. Right now the PS3 doesn't have a playlist anyway, but that may be in a future firmware update.

I have no plans on ripping HD DVD or Bluray movies, this was only for movie sets that has multiple sequels and episodic TV. It really only takes approximately 15 minutes for me to do a disc, so I wouldn't be spending 800 hours and I wouldn't even want to. That's one of the reasons (aside from the lower video PQ) that I looked for another method other than PS3 Video 9 and PS3 DVD Converter. Nine hours to do one 1GB chunk VOB file (PS3 Video 9) and over 10 hours to do an entire disc using PS3 DVD Converter... that was just too much time and in the end it looked like I put in an old VHS tape. 15-20 minutes, a simple rename, and boom it's added to the media drive and no difference than watching the original DVD.

I can see how this may sound crazy to some, but to those interested in doing this there is a certain satisfaction to having a point and click media archive of not just movies, but favorite CDs and photo albums... Some people think I'm nuts for having five computers, other people just think I'm nuts!

[bob1029]

Ok, since we have the ripping/transfer covered, its time to cover the aspect of compression.

Tools needed: Handbrake, DvdShrink

The first step is to rip the movie with Dvdshrink using the method outlined earlier in this thread. The idea is to get a single vob file for a movie, or if dealing with episodic content, one vob per episode. Also, be sure to ONLY rip the audio track you want, preferably the 5.1 track and cut the subtitles, as they wont be usable with this method (unless you want them permanently burned into the video stream).

Next, you need to get Handbrake installed. Make sure you have the .Net Framework v2.0 or higher before installing.

Once Handbrake is installed, you can fire it up and browse to the video_ts folder you wish to process. I often get a message stating "Error: Error reading the DVD. Some Title information may not be available." This does not seem to affect the funtionality of the program. Your screen should now look something like this:



Now you need to select the DVD Title you wish to encode. For movies there should only be 1 title if you ripped it properly. For episodic content, there should be several. Select the first one in either case. Leave the dvd chapters at automatic. You can select the destination you need, and make sure the encoder is set to H.264, and AAC for the audio. The picture settings can be left as-is.

Now for the Video Settings Tab:



You can leave everything as is, and type in the Target Size of 2000 into the box. This can obviously be modified as you see fit, but is a good starting point as I found the quality to be acceptable. For episodic content you want about 17 megs per minute, so for a 48 minute tv series episode, 800 megs is about right.

On to the Audio Settings:



I have not had a chance to test these settings, as I do not own a ps3, but the only way I got multichannel audio through my pc was to use the following:

Bitrate: 320
Sample Rate: 44.1
Audio Track: 5.1
Enable Mixdown: 6 channel discrete

If someone can confirm or deny these audio settings, I will modify this as needed.

Now you can either select encode now, or if you want to you can add to queue and set up another conversion. The queue is very nice if you want to convert about 5 movies while you sleep, or an entire season of 24 . On my E6300 (running @ 2.8ghz), I converted all of minority report in ~1 hour 30 minutes. If you have more time to burn, you can select the 2-pass encode option which will scan the movie for bandwidth highs/lows and reallocate bitrate to improve quality with the same resulting size.

[wbassett]

Bob I'll give it a test (probably not for a day or two though) and check it out on the PS3.

I especially like the batch processing this can do. That makes life a whole lot easier.

We'll have to get an XBOX 360 guru and get a thread going down in the PC/HTPC/Console forum and put the highlights up here in a thread for an HD DVD media server setup

What are your PC specs (ram, etc.) for anyone needing to look at minimum system requirements?

[bob1029]

As far as requirements go for running this encoding process, there are no minimum other than storage space and windows xp. For general guideline purposes, my system is running the following:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 Overclocked to 2.8GHZ
2 GB XMS2 memory
BFG Geforce 7800GTXOC
2x 74GB WD Raptor in Raid-0
2x 500GB Maxline Maxtor in Raid-1
1x 320GB Maxtor
Bluegears B-Enspirer Soundcard

If you have a Core 2 Duo cpu, and a decent amount of ram, you can expect the encode time to run a little over half the actual runtime of the movie using the settings above.

Also, the xbox 360 can act as a media center extender, so for 360 users with networked computers, you can install the Zune application on your computer and share your media library for the xbox to see. The 360 can play back most (if not all) wmvhd content, which is easily encoded using windows movie maker or wmencoder. I may start a new thread for this if no one else does tomorrow and outlines some methodologies.