A comparison of PS3 and 360 as media players

[patsu]

I forgot to mention that the other way to play video over a network on the PS3 is to use the web browser.
e.g., TwonkyMedia Server will listen to port 9000 by default for HTTP requests. You can navigate and view the server videos using the web browser.

PS3 will buffer and play the files as it downloads. But I have not experimented with it extensively (Yes, you can fast forward too).

 

[patsu]

patsu, I should note that my PS3 copy times WERE over my GigE NOT my wireless, the wireless test was just as a reference point.

Whoops, I have misread your statement (Thought 700mb took over 5 minutes to download).

My point still stand. If you want to play HD movies over WiFi, you may have to copy them locally to play regardless of platform choice. For SD videos, you can stream them. I just found out that the Frame Noise, Mosquito Noise, and Block Noise Reduction options are also available if you stream the files (over DLNA or the web browser). No upscaling unless it's local (me thinks).

This is absurd, why in the world would I re-organize my itunes organized music library? The 360 already reads the playlists that are in itunes and has a much easier method for navigating.

If you use iTunes, your music files are already organized into folders. They are also annotated with attributes. You don't need extra work to organize these files on a PS3.
The PS3 Playlist format is m3u. In your case, you should be able to find free tools to convert iTunes playlists to m3u.

I was refering to Photos for custom organization.
I use the PS3 for storing all media.
My wife likes the built-in month-by-month organization. It shows our little kid growing up and she doesn't have to organize the pictures at all (It's all automatic).

Unfortunately, I prefer to organize them by "context" (e.g., Grandpa's visit). PS3 allows you to do that via the user-editable "Album Information" field. But it's a pain to change them in bulk. The alternative is to create a playlist of photos (I guess I can do that on a PC/Mac first). Some DLNA servers (e.g., TVersity) support playlist inherently. So that's a third option.


EDIT: What the... Sony just updated its Blog to talk about custom Photo playlist
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2008/12/26/ps3-how-to-creating-and-viewing-a-photo-slideshow/

Hey Sony, if you're reading this, contribute to the PS3 MediaServer project to fix joker454's HD gigabit fast forward issues. The techniques will be stolen by other DLNA server projects.

 

[psorcerer]

You might want to try out PS3 Media Server new(er) open source media server to share data for ps3. As far as I have tried it seems to be superior to tversity in all things that matter. Wider and easier support for transcoding/file formats/subtitles/etc. The selling feature for me was the .iso support+subtitles. This makes it possible to archive easily the dvd's I have bought as digital copies to server. Without subtitles I would be lost on the non english content I have bought. I also like that it doesn't create a database of content but rather "maps your harddrive directly" to ps3. This makes navigation snappy and no need to those "recreate database and wait for half an hour after update".

Tried it, needs a lot of debugging.
But most of the problems are on the mencoder side, the subtitles crash it too frequently.
But thanks, maybe I can try and fix some of these.

 

[Babel-17]

The 4Gb limit also applies to mp4's. You can demux them with YAMB however and then load the streams into tsMuxeR. That will give you other options.

 

[Fafalada]

All this discussion around "oh, it's easy, you just convert your video files to x format to y format and it works most of the time" is a fairly laughable solution.

Compared to the amount of time people spend obtaining those videos (whether through downloads or ripping(which 99% involves ReEncoding)), remuxing them to another container(which is measured in seconds even for large HD videos) doesn't even register in comparison.
And it's not like those that maintain large collections lack the free time to do these things - they clearly have both the time and dedication to spend large amounts of time organizing their libraries. If their primary concern was convenience, they wouldn't be doing that in the first place.

Honestly, the first device to play what VLC does - in a 15mb download no less - will be the best media player.

I've first tried VLC 7 years ago, and while it was pretty pathetic back then, it's still not without issues and bugs today. I kinda hope MS and Sony don't take this long with their stuff, and with better end results.

 

[joker454]

If you're using gigabit like joker454 and my office PS3, copying should be fast (I copy 32Gb Windows VM images rather frequently).

What speeds do you get? I find I get no where near gigabits max potential, I guess I'm limited by disk speeds, so it still takes waaay too long to copy files over, at least far longer than I'm willing to wait. Either way, having to copy files over seems kinda archaic, the tech already exists to not have to do this anyways. The 360 is only 100mbps and has no problem playing/fast forwarding hd videos, so the latest wireless should be able to handle it also no?

Compared to the amount of time people spend obtaining those videos (whether through downloads or ripping(which 99% involves ReEncoding)), remuxing them to another container(which is measured in seconds even for large HD videos) doesn't even register in comparison.

It takes very little user involvement once you've settled on a codec and its settings. I experimented with lots of codecs/settings and settled on VC-1 which to me gave the best picture with reasonable file sizes of just a few gig. Everything now is automated so my involvement is all of three mouse clicks and presto, 8 hours later my file is ready. It takes none of my time at all which is good, because I have no patience anymore for twiddling around. Now that I've found the optimal settings though, I have no plans to change what I do to accommodate hardware limitations. I'm certainly not gonna start splitting files, especially when there is no need! That's why I agree that it's comical when people suggest hey, just rencode! No chance, what I've got gives great results and I have no plans to reencode, remux, split or whatever to all my 70+ bluray rips and all my home hd movies.

 

[patsu]

What speeds do you get? I find I get no where near gigabits max potential, I guess I'm limited by disk speeds, so it still takes waaay too long to copy files over, at least far longer than I'm willing to wait. Either way, having to copy files over seems kinda archaic, the tech already exists to not have to do this anyways. The 360 is only 100mbps and has no problem playing/fast forwarding hd videos, so the latest wireless should be able to handle it also no?

I get similar numbers to NavNucST3. About 1+ minute per Gb (2.6Gb takes about 3 minutes). The only boxes on my gigabit network are the PS3, my MacBook Pro and the NAS box.

My HD playback experience over 802.11g WiFi hasn't been so positive. There were pauses. If I want to fast forward and rewind, I prefer instant feedback. Any lag would turn me off. A proper streaming solution should work, but DLNA is a HTTP-based "streaming" solution.

Copying files to the PS3 may be archaic but it works well so far. I also don't have to keep any additional PC around (Just 3 laptops: 1 for each family member).

Would be nice to stream everything from an all-powerful central box, but it's messed up months/year ago. And I don't have the time to upkeep it (I'm away from Home mostly these days). Now I just use a simple NAS box with PS3 HDD as a "working cache".

In the office, I started with a more powerful NAS box and gigabit. Eventually, I still ended up copying stuff to the PS3 because of privacy concern.

It takes very little user involvement once you've settled on a codec and its settings. I experimented with lots of codecs/settings and settled on VC-1 which to me gave the best picture with reasonable file sizes of just a few gig. Everything now is automated so my involvement is all of three mouse clicks and presto, 8 hours later my file is ready. It takes none of my time at all which is good, because I have no patience anymore for twiddling around. Now that I've found the optimal settings though, I have no plans to change what I do to accommodate hardware limitations. I'm certainly not gonna start splitting files, especially when there is no need! That's why I agree that it's comical when people suggest hey, just rencode! No chance, what I've got gives great results and I have no plans to reencode, remux, split or whatever to all my 70+ bluray rips and all my home hd movies.

Yeah, encoding is time consuming. I used to do it (even wrote my own automated workflow client to do so). I dislike tying up my PC for a few hours (e.g., Sometimes I want to use the PC for something else, or reboot into a different OS). I avoid it altogether these days. I also stick to the standards since I have a mix of brands (H.264 works as well as VC-1 in terms of efficiency). I prefer to view the original Blu-ray movies in 1080p and sometimes I poke around BD-Live and the extras.

For other non-essentials, upscaled DVD quality works for me. Occasionally, I get HD media. I just copy them to the PS3 or NAS depending on my needs. The copying happens while I'm busy with other work (They finish up in minutes anyway -- No 8 hour delay/cycle for me !). One thing I found out is that the PS3 is pretty good at recognizing duplicated media. If I have duplicated photos/videos, it would alert me.

Although my media stays constant, I find that my topology changes rather quickly as my needs evolved, the HDD space fluctuated, and systems failed or got upgraded. It usually takes a while for things to get back in shape. So far, I have used my PS3 standalone (Most media copied to internal HDD), with everything streamed from a RAID box, or a mix of both. There are times I brought my PS3 to friends' home too. So the copied media on the PS3 HDD do come in handy sometimes. With the 2nd PS3 at Home, I have setup my RemotePlay again (My office PS3 is behind some serious firewall config).

Personally, I spent very little time (if at all) on my media infrastructure. The PS3 is versatile enough to handle all my use cases (expected and unexpected). I love the flexibility and the media quality I get. That is all.

 

[manux]

I'm streaming all the media except mp3's to playstation3. I haven't had problems with network errors/rewinding/etc. after I started to use cable connection instead of wlan. Though the heaviest content I have tends to be under 1.5GB size and in 720p. For those 720p files the 120* fast forwarding/rewind works just fine without hiccups. If the content is transcoded then the transcoder part can cause hiccups to rewind if pc cpu/harddrive is maxed. Though that doesn't happen anymore as it's pretty damn fast to remux the .mkv content into vob/mp4 and use format ps3 supports natively. Remuxing takes around 2-3 minutes for 1GB file.

I'm wanting to currently digitilize my dvd collection which should be fine with the help of ps3mediaserver and I don't need slow re-encoding as the dvd-structure works just fine. For blu-rays I want full quality and I'm not willing to start to re-encode them. For that 8hour encoding it would be faster to get the digital copy from internet than to re-encode it myself from original blu-ray

btw. just bough 7 blu-rays from amazon.co.uk. Average price was 12.6e including postal fees. Life starts to be good on blu-ray world as prices have come to sensible level.

 

[patsu]

manux, your PMS post prompted me to experiment with my topology more. I should move my home NAS to be with the PS3 in the living room (on a loan gigabit hub plugged to a wireless access point). The laptops will continue to access the NAS via WiFi.

I gain more flexibility and speed for the entertainment center that way. I should be able to keep all the parts hidden too.

 

[Fafalada]

It takes very little user involvement

Which doesn't change if you added remuxing step to your converter pipeline(and batch remuxing existing 70 movies would not take your PC 8 hours either). My point was (and your post agrees) that it's not an issue of time investment, but personal preferences - you don't want to touch your setup, and that's fine.

I'm pretty finicky that way myself so I can relate (eg. it took me 3 years to switch my home-PC to XP(from 2k), and at this rate I'll probably skip Vista alltogether).

Life starts to be good on blu-ray world as prices have come to sensible level.

Indeed, I finally got PlanetEarth this holliday, from Amazon.Uk for ~40$.

 

[tuna]

If you have problems seeking in streamed HD movies on the PS3, try to serve them from your own web server instead of DLNA. That is what I do and I have had almost no problems using 120X seeking on 1080p movies in multiple formats.

 

[patsu]

If you have problems seeking in streamed HD movies on the PS3, try to serve them from your own web server instead of DLNA. That is what I do and I have had almost no problems using 120X seeking on 1080p movies in multiple formats.

That's what I noticed when I tried it yesterday. The PS3 player also put up notices when buffering web videos, whereas it remained silent in DLNA.

Playing it locally is still smoother and instant though
I'd probably still do it often.



EDIT:
Here you go...

http://www.avforums.com/forums/8430365-post581.html

so, based on my (little) network expertise, it seems that ps3 ask for chunks of 1Mb with fast fwd/rwd... and this every 2 or 3 seconds (in movie time), to simulate the fast movie preview, each network queries occurs 2 to 3 times per second (depending of the answer response time of course)
that means the server must be (very) responsive for you to see something pleasant when fast fwding (I talk about streaming, not transcoding)

on Linux, it seems more responsive cause Linux does not need this 200ms ACK with Windows TCP networking (ask google on this)

so, to me, ps3 could do better, and maybe windows could be tuned for better tcp performance

On Windows' 200ms ACK behaviour:
http://www.gershnik.com/faq/comm.asp#200ms (Linked Knowledge Base article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;214397)

On Mac: http://www.stuartcheshire.org/papers/NagleDelayedAck/

Not sure if this is helpful: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823764

Indeed, I finally got PlanetEarth this holliday

Nice ! Always glad to see people pick out excellent content.
Look out for Birds of Paradise in Disc 3 (I think it's the Jungle episode)

 

[RudeCurve]

What frustrates me the most about X360's media player capabilities is the fact that even after upgrading to NXE, the video player still does not have a repeat/loop option...WTF??? HELLO?????

 

[-tkf-]

I experimented with lots of codecs/settings and settled on VC-1 which to me gave the best picture with reasonable file sizes of just a few gig. Everything now is automated so my involvement is all of three mouse clicks and presto, 8 hours later my file is ready. It takes none of my time at all which is good, because I have no patience anymore for twiddling around. Now that I've found the optimal settings though, I have no plans to change what I do to accommodate hardware limitations. I'm certainly not gonna start splitting files, especially when there is no need! That's why I agree that it's comical when people suggest hey, just rencode! No chance, what I've got gives great results and I have no plans to reencode, remux, split or whatever to all my 70+ bluray rips and all my home hd movies.

Whats your setup for encoding the VC-1 files, home made?, or do you use something that can be shared. Might save me some time

 

[joker454]

Whats your setup for encoding the VC-1 files, home made?, or do you use something that can be shared. Might save me some time

Sure! I use AnyDVDHD to dump the bluray to pc, BDInfo to figure out which playlist is the correct one, and TSMuxer to remove streams I don't need and ultimately spit out a single m2ts file. Those steps are easy and fairly quick.

For encoding I use TMPGEnc 4.0. It lets you make templates, so after twiddling with settings I settled on these and saved them as a "Bluray" template:

Video: Windows Media Video 9 (2 pass VBR (average bitrate)) [1280 x 720 / 23.976 fps / 4000 kb/s], Video Quality=95

Audio: Windows Media Audio 9.2 (1 pass CBR) [192 kbps, 48 kHz, stereo CBR]

Note, I only need two channel audio since these files are played on lesser setups like in the bedroom, guest room, laptops, portables, etc, so 2 channel audio is fine. Downstairs on the main tv I watch the discs to get best picture and sound. Still though, these re-encodes look pretty darned good to me, far better than dvd that's for sure. The only issue is that encoding is slooooooooooow, about 8 hours for my quad core pc for a typical movie. However, the makers of TmpgEnc have started supporting CUDA (only for mpeg 2 at the moment) so one day it should be way quicker to re-encode these.

So right now I can load up a bunch of m2ts files into TmpgEnc, pick my template, click encode, and it will spit out completed movies hours later, which I then move to the raid 5 unit so they are backed up. I took a peek at my current movies, the smallest one is Run Lola Run at 2.5gb, and the largest is Godfather 2 at 6.2gb. Most seem to be in the 3-4gb range though. Data rate varies on each movie. For example in vista when I click on the Godfather 2 file it reports it as 11873kbps, whereas Run Lola Run is reported as 5339kbps.

 

[tuna]

joker454: Can the PS3 play the spit out m2ts file?

 

[joker454]

joker454: Can the PS3 play the spit out m2ts file?

Not sure, I didn't try playing the m2ts file. They are too big to keep around, typically between 15gb and 30gb, so I deleted them once my customized smaller version was made. I've read though that the PS3 does indeed play them directly, but again I never tried myself.

 

[Babel-17]

I justed posted the following over at slackercentral.

Got myself Badaboom, the media encoder that uses the CUDA feature of advanced nVidia video cards.

http://www.badaboomit.com/?q=node/4

It's on sale for a few more days.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/12_days.html

The 12 Days of NVIDIA promotion, in which Badaboom is included, has been extended to January 5th!

I used the "trashcan" icon so as to not include the feature of being able to re-download the program for two years. nVidia gives you thirty days. I just backed up the file on several drives.

So, with the code, my total was $23.99.

Lol, nice free extra!

Custom NVIDIA Chip Clear Lucite Keychain

If you want a piece of NVIDIA technology, NVIDIA's chip keychain is your answer. With a genuine NVIDIA G98 chip inside a 1.5" square clear lucite key tag you not only get a real GPU, but also a key chain. The G98 chip comes complete with an engraved NVIDIA logo.

Click for detail views.


* Clear Lucite
* NVIDIA G98 chip
* 1.5" square

http://store.digitalriver.com/store/nvidia/Content/pbPage.chip_keychain_pop_up?prod=2

Very nice though lacking the options for very high compression by way of lots of B-Frames and reference frames. Here's a typical output.

Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : Main@L4.0
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames : 2 frames
Codec ID : avc1
Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding

But I've compared the output to what HandBrake can deliver with its plethora of advanced options for high quality and I'm still quite pleased.

It goes without saying one hates to have no option to preserve the original AC3 or DTS audio (it encodes to two channel AAC audio) but in fairness that's also a limitation of the mp4 format.

Fortunately there's freeware that allows demuxing and remuxing of that with the video portion from Badaboom into other containers.

Since Elephants Dream was released under a Creative Commons license I felt free to try that*. Great results using less than the file size.

Feel free to ask questions. Lol, as long as they're not too technical!

http://orange.blender.org/

http://orange.blender.org/blog/creative-commons-license-2/

Using other freeware I was (hopefully) able to create an ISO which I can burn to disk and play on a PS3 or an AVCHD ready Blu ray player.

My brother in law has one and I'm eager to test.

Naturally, I'm only willing to discuss legal uses of this (or other) software.

*If I'm wrong about this please tell me.

 

[RobertR1]

It'd seem an effort to patch up BD+ was attempted. That effort lasted a couple of weeks. New version of AnyDVD is out. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/179/1050179/slysoft-re-cracks-bd-

 

[Neb]

Great program, worth it's price. That + PowerDVD 8 allows me to watch Blu-ray movies without problems on my PC. Supposedly Vista x64 Media Player 11 got support for Blu-ray but I never got it to work (MP11 x32 always launched). No problems now with AnyDVDHD and PowerDVD 8 combo!