I just bought a Playstation 3, my rationale being that it is "three revolutionary devices all in one" (sorry Steve): a Linux PC, a gaming device, and a Blu-Ray player. And after the latest price drop, it was more attractive than ever, who could resist? I certainly couldn't, I wanted something to really show off what my new 1080p TV can do. It turns our the Playstation isn't the box to do the things that I want when it comes to HD.
1. Linux is nerfed.
So I get the box home, get Ubuntu 7.04 on there, open up Synaptic, and download VLC. I try some 1080i MPEG2 content from a USB external HFS+ formatted drive I have. These recordings are direct, uncompressed digital rips of DVB-C MPEG2 recorded from my Cable Box via Firewire. When the picture looks grainy and the framerate is about 10fps, I remember that the Linux kernel is running on top of a hypervisor that restricts access to certain parts of the hardware, namely the badass mother of a GPU. Without access to the graphics hardware (and without a custom kernel and apps designed for the additional six availiable SIMD cores), there is no hope of being able to decode a 1.5MB/s MPEG2 stream. So I give up on Linux as my solution.
2. The Playstation3 OS supports no modern filesystem on external media.
As they might say on Law and Order, Linux is OUT. So I try the next logical step, booting up the PS3 OS and seeing if it will support my files. I connect my HFS+ drive...and nothing happens. As a sanity check, I connect a FAT32 drive I have, and it shows up as a USB device. After some google-ing, I read that the PS3 OS will only support FAT on external drives. This KILLS any hope of using it as a HD media hub. Why? Because FAT32 only supports files up to 4GiB in size. While this is okay for 1080i content under about 45 minutes, it is USELESS for movies. I have several 9GB and 10GB rips of 1080i broadcast movies, and I know there are plenty of people out there who are starting to rip 20GB and 30GB copies of their HD-DVD and BD-ROM movies. No dice for you if these are on drives that support large file sizes and you want to use them with the PS3. Hell, the Xbox360 supports HFS+ so that it can play music off of your Mac formatted Ipod. The PS3 needs support for SOMETHING modern that PCs use, either NTFS (Windows), EXT2/3 (most Linuxes), or HFS (MacOS).
3. Even when all else is right, playback can suck!
There is a small piece of good news: the Playstation3 OS can play raw MPEG2 TS, something which was unexpected. This should mean that if you are recording from a cable box via firewire, you don't have to perform a remux to a program stream. Of course it doesn't mean this, because of a bug in the TS playback. It for some reason cannot identify the audio packets in streams that VLC on a computer has no problem with, and doesn't demux them properly for playback. The end result: no sound for some TS files. Okay, so I remux to PS, and playback. Bear in mind these are all 30min TV show files under the 4GiB limit, transferred using a FAT32 drive. Hey, I have sound, I have 1080i video!...I have jerky motion, frames skipped...and this is the best, frames filled in from about two seconds back! Thats right, the scene has cut to the next shot, and I'm seeing randomly interspersed frames from about two seconds ago. Looks like the decoder hiccups and goes crazy when the scene changes drastically but before an I-frame comes up. This problem only happens with content recorded from certain channels, and not with others. Either way, it is a bug in the video playback, with no convenient bug reporting system. Give me bugzilla, and I would post a clip to Sony devs proving that the MPEG-2 playback can choke on regular files that play fine on a computer with VLC. They are no help on the phone, Sony Entertainment pawning me of on Sony Corporate, and vice versa, with no one listening to my complaint. I finally sent an e-mail...I wish I could talk to a developer or engineer.
4. Video File Format Support?
Its nice that the system supports MPEG-4 AVC and SP, somewhat cool for people who have things that were already converted for their iPods. I tried some of my iPod compatible videos both 320*240 AVC, and 640*480 SP, and they worked...but what joy is there in watching these on a 1920*1080 display? The advanced simple profile, however, is not supported, meaning that any DVDs you might have encoded with DivX or Xvid won't play, as these are MPEG4 ASP. I tried a few CDs with 700MB Divx/Xvid files, with the PS3 saying "unsupported format". And anyway these would look like crap on my display.
In conclusion, they shouldn't try to bill it as a HD media hub. It plays games well, and it plays Blu-Ray...but not much else useful.
4 comments:
So basically you're pissed off because all your pirated media won't work on your PS3. You know if you went out and bought that shit on blu-ray it would work without a hitch.
This should be titled "Why Ubuntu on PS3 is no good for media" as opposed to the latter. You can store video files on the HD and play them directly from the XMB without a problem in full on uncompressed HD. Additionally, if you don't want to store the content on your PS3, you can stream it from a computer since it recognizes pcs as media servers. You can also play supported media from external devices right from XMB as well. I downloaded the MGS4 HD gameplay video on my cpu, copied it to my flash drive and played it right off my flash drive using the XMB. And if you want files greater than fat32 can handle, then stream it from your computer to the PS3, fixes size limit problems. No console supports xvid/divx for a reason and they most like never will. To fix this, again, stream it from your computer. If you want to get so "in depth" and technical on specific file formats and encoding types, then it shouldn't be difficult for you to set up your computer to stream and encode xvid/divx on the fly to your PS3, it is quite simple.
Everything you list here deals specifically with the OS, not with the XMB, which you can do most of this stuff with. Blu-ray, dvd, downloaded content, stream media to it, serve media from it, and the capability of accessing your PS3 files from anywhere you are, with special support for PSP. Sounds like a media hub to me.
Its not pirated media BTW . It is backed up DVR content from my Motorolla DVR box. They don't support external hard drives, so I clean out my DVR and backup to external drive. Why would I buy on Blu-ray when its perfectly legal to keep DVR'd media?
@Roberto: What I'm saying is that it CANNOT in fact play some properly formatted files correctly. The video unit is buggy on some files I have that play fine on a computer. And yes, my next installment is going to be about how to setup a streaming server.
i would think that it wouldn't take too much extra time to read the entire post, rather than just bitch about the first line. also, i was under the impression that you might have a minute understanding of FCC fair use laws before labeling someone a media "pirate."
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