A comparison of PS3 and 360 as media players

[-tkf-]

We actually have the synology ds2411+ loaded up with 3tb hdd's and dsm 3.2, been using it for quite some time now and we love it. But I leave most of those other features off. For one we really don't need it, all the devices in the house work perfectly without it. I don't have any mkv's, etc, either, most of my videos are basically either wmv or h264 now, or blu-ray rips which work perfectly over the network to pc's or popcorn hour units anyways, no stutters, perfect audio, no issues for years now. It's been a trouble free network for quite some time now, very happy with it. Given that I prefer to leave the raid units cpu dedicated to just serving files and nothing more. It maxes out our gigabit network which is how I like it Although we're patiently waiting for 10gbe to get more affordable since more speed would be nice. The Intel 540 10gbe card leaves me hopeful that cheap cat6 10gbe hardware will be here this year.

Nice

Personally i am looking into the Freenas / ZFS stuff, with the amount of data needed today for something like you do, traditional RAID is getting to the limit of my comfort zone.

 

[Brad Grenz]

If it's not actively streaming anything DLNA uses basically zero resources. Since you've clearly run into a rare scenario where it would be useful to you, seems like the solution is just to turn it on so it's there if you ever need it.

 

[-tkf-]

Ultra Violet just got a bit more Ultra

http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/13/walmart-in-store-disc-to-digital-ultraviolet-conversion-gets-off/

In a press event panel that included almost every big studio executive -- sans Disney -- Walmart announced an exclusive in-store disc to digital conversion service. Starting April 16th, in more than 3,500 stores, you'll be able to bring your DVD or Blu-ray discs in and have 'em added to your Vudu movie collection. The privilege of watching movies you already bought on a disc online via Vudu will cost you $2, but if you own the DVD, it'll cost you $5 to upgrade your digital copy to HD. In addition, you can now buy UltraViolet movies via Vudu and watch them via other UV supported sources -- we assume this is a two-way street, but it isn't spelled out that way in the press release (after the break). This is easily the biggest news for the, now beta badged, UltraViolet service but most of our complaints persist until there's single-sign on and the standard downloadable CFF (common file format) is a reality.

 

[patsu]

Walmart in-store disc to digital UltraViolet conversion gets official
http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/13/walmart-in-store-disc-to-digital-ultraviolet-conversion-gets-off/

Walmart, in partnership with the major Hollywood studios: Paramount Home Media Distribution, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, Universal Studios Home Entertainment and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, is increasing the value of movie ownership for its customers. Starting April 16th, 2012 in more than 3,500 stores, Walmart customers will be able to bring their DVD and Blu-ray collections to Walmart and receive digital access to their favorite titles from the partnering studios. An equal conversion for standard DVDs and Blu-ray discs will be $2. Standard DVDs can be upgraded to High-Def (HD) for $5.

The appetite for enjoying movies is strong and growing. Walmart wants to help movie lovers download or stream their movies when they want and where they want. Walmart asked thousands of customers their thoughts regarding movie ownership. Customers want to own physical Blu-rays and DVDs and customers also want to have digital access to those same movies for convenience. Customers also cited accessibility, security, affordability, and simplicity as key decision factors for wanting a digital solution. Walmart listened and is delivering America's first disc-to-digital service.

Muahaha, let's see how it goes. ^_^

I watch most of my streaming movies on Vudu because of its Day-n-Date release with DVD. Will wait for more companies to jump onto this Blu-ray/DVD redemption bandwagon.

I agree with Engadget's closing comments:

This is easily the biggest news for the, now beta badged, UltraViolet service but most of our complaints persist until there's single-sign on and the standard downloadable CFF (common file format) is a reality.

EDIT: Whoops, too late !

 

[joker454]

Personally i am looking into the Freenas / ZFS stuff, with the amount of data needed today for something like you do, traditional RAID is getting to the limit of my comfort zone.

Yeah at some point regular raid units just become too tough to use if they don't have fast transfer rates to go with it. Aside from blurays I also use the synology as a backup for all my video work that I do and keep copies of the same footage on hdd's at the bank. The darned thing is already 45% full, kinda scary how much space video data needs!

If it's not actively streaming anything DLNA uses basically zero resources. Since you've clearly run into a rare scenario where it would be useful to you, seems like the solution is just to turn it on so it's there if you ever need it.

Well I'm not the only one that uses it of course, the house is wired up with gigabit so multiple people can be hitting the unit at once.

Ultra Violet just got a bit more Ultra

The idea isn't bad...but $5? I guess maybe they figure people will sell their dvd's after they pay $5 to convert them, maybe that's why that costs more. Whereas with the blurays it's only $2 because they figure they will still keep the blurays after buying the dd version. So the bluray dd version is complimentary to the disc, whereas the dvd version is intended to replace it. I wonder how they can prevent abuse here though. What stops 5 people walking in with the same bluray that a friend has and getting a $2 digital download? I don't think blurays are individually marked/serial numbered, or are they?

 

[patsu]

Yeah, the raw disc and network performance are both critical to the final experiences. It is rather easy to see this if you have a huge library of media. Every operation from navigation to conversion will become a pain in the *ss.

I moved and watched my media between my NAS box, MacBook Pro and the PS3 local HDDs. Without a high performance RAID system, the bottleneck was the discs.

DLNA doesn't really add that much of an overhead for streaming, but it can be painful for:
(A) Browsing since the system will try to deliver the thumbnails one by one.
(B) Fast forward and rewind
...on an average network.

Then again, if the "raw" network is slow, a network file system over it will be sluggish too.

 

[patsu]

Netflix "Just for Kids" Now on PlayStation 3
http://blog.netflix.com/2012/03/netflix-just-for-kids-now-on.html

I'm very happy to announce the latest release of Netflix "Just for Kids," now on the PlayStation 3. Whether you are a kid in age or a kid at heart, you will love our new section on the PS3, designed specifically for kids with content appropriate for those 12 and under.

Parents and caregivers, you can unleash your kids in this section of Netflix and not worry about titles that could be inappropriate. Our "Just for Kids" section was such a hit on the Web site, Nintendo Wii and Apple TV, that we have now added it to PS3.

...

 

[BRiT]

I moved and watched my media between my NAS box, MacBook Pro and the PS3 local HDDs. Without a high performance RAID system, the bottleneck was the discs.

Really? You had issues with that? I stream multiple full-bit versions of bluray movies from my slow 5400 rpm drives in my unRAID server and never had a hiccup. Unless you have something seriously wrong with your network, any hard drive will never be the bottleneck when streaming even three 54 megabit/sec files off drives easily capable of 75+ megabytes/sec.

 

[joker454]

DLNA doesn't really add that much of an overhead for streaming, but it can be painful for:
(A) Browsing since the system will try to deliver the thumbnails one by one.
(B) Fast forward and rewind
...on an average network.

Yeah see that's where the popcorn hour shines, I can ff/rew easily at very fast speeds and multiple ratios, 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, 32x, with zero lag. It's all very responsive, bluray movies also startup instantly, etc. My past experience with dlna over our gigabit network was quite painful in comparison. Hence I'm generally not a fan of dlna, it just seems to worsen the experience so I always disable it now.

 

[patsu]

Really? You had issues with that? I stream multiple full-bit versions of bluray movies from my slow 5400 rpm drives in my unRAID server and never had a hiccup. Unless you have something seriously wrong with your network, any hard drive will never be the bottleneck when streaming even three 54 megabit/sec files off drives easily capable of 75+ megabytes/sec.

Your day-to-day usage will involve more than just streaming one video file though. ^_^

Yeah see that's where the popcorn hour shines, I can ff/rew easily at very fast speeds and multiple ratios, 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, 32x, with zero lag. It's all very responsive, bluray movies also startup instantly, etc. My past experience with dlna over our gigabit network was quite painful in comparison. Hence I'm generally not a fan of dlna, it just seems to worsen the experience so I always disable it now.

Yeah depending on the UI, you'll need to access hundreds of thumbnails at the same time as you scroll down the list quickly.

For high performance access, you can't use the DLNA server on the NAS device. It's underpowered. As you mentioned, it's better to dedicate it just to serve files or a stream. That's how I use it too.

In the network file system model, the PC/Mac CPU or even GPU does most of the heavy lifting. The NAS just delivers the file data.

For transcoding, I prefer to download everything locally, then convert. But auto-transcoding in PC/Mac DLNA server is convenient sometimes. Naturally, you don't want the NAS CPU to transcode. ^_^ You'll need a full-blown PC/Mac DLNA server for a full featured setup.

Surprisingly, streaming on PS3 via HTTP works rather well too, better than DLNA for FF and REWIND too.

EDIT:
So if you don't want to waste time transcoding your own Blu-rays and DVDs, then AppleTV's iCloud copy, or Walmart's DVD/Blu-ray exchange would be your out-of-pocket choice. ^_^

 

[Brad Grenz]

Netflix "Just for Kids" Now on PlayStation 3
http://blog.netflix.com/2012/03/netflix-just-for-kids-now-on.html

Yeah, I've been getting the option since last week when I boot up Netflix on my PS3. Hope they add it to Roku soon. It should, at the least, be a way to keep from getting a bunch of kids stuff in my recommendations after every time my nieces and nephews visit. At least, I hope that's how it works...

 

[joker454]

So if you don't want to waste time transcoding your own Blu-rays and DVDs, then AppleTV's iCloud copy, or Walmart's DVD/Blu-ray exchange would be your out-of-pocket choice. ^_^

Well I don't transcode at all, all my blurays are kept in their native format so the data is just streamed and played natively by every device It's amazing how simple this is to do nowadays.

Aside from that, the wallmart deal seems not bad the more i think about it. If you are still with dvd and never made the jump to bluray or digital, now for $3 per movie ($5 to buy dd version, sell old dvd for $2) you can upgrade your entire collection to dd and presumably better quality. In fact this is better than having an actual bluray in some cases because it will just be the movie and no filler. I strip all the crap out of my blurays so I only keep the movie, hence in 1 second from a button click I'm watching the actual movie, but many blurays can be painful to watch as they take a minute+ to startup, then you have trailers, then goofy menus, then you have to set correct audio, etc, it can take forever to get into the actual movie. So this dd upgrade might actually be less painful to watch than the real thing. I use Pavtube to make my mobile versions (one button click and done) so I won't bother with this, but I can see how it can be useful for others.

One thing I'm wonering...does it create an "upgraded" dd version from your dvd version? Like does it do a re-encode on the spot? Or do they support a limited set of movies for which they have an hd dd version ready to go? The latter should provide way better quality since presumably it uses the bluray version as the master to encode from.

 

[patsu]

I haven't decided yet. I may exchange a few favorite ones. Need to know the resolution first.

You may need to transcode the video if you want to watch the videos on so-called post-PC devices. The native Blu-ray stream is too advanced for these gadgets. If you just want a "raw" file for streaming in the living room, then it should be relatively straightforward.

The physical discs are still better for the extra features, but I'm think it may not be difficult to extract the entire AVCHD structure from Blu-ray to do the same thing digitally.

 

[BRiT]

Your day-to-day usage will involve more than just streaming one video file though. ^_^

Reread what I wrote. I have had no problems streaming multiple full bit-rate blurays even from the same physical drive off my media server. I was able to stream 4 movies at the same time without any hiccups. I couldn't test more because I ran out of client systems to use.

There's nothing special with my setup, it's just a union filesystem on top of just a bunch of disks. That's why it surprises me when you say you have trouble because the drives in your raid system isn't fast enough to keep up for read operations.

 

[joker454]

You may need to transcode the video if you want to watch the videos on so-called post-PC devices. The native Blu-ray stream is too advanced for these gadgets. If you just want a "raw" file for streaming in the living room, then it should be relatively straightforward.

Well for that I don't transcode, I make mobile encodes using Pavtube. I've made mobile version of about 8 movies so that I could put them on my phone and my wife's ipad. It's literally a two step process, drag the single video file from any bluray rip to the program, then click button. Presto, mobile version pops out on other end. So I have a few movie favorites always on my phone.

There's nothing special with my setup, it's just a union filesystem on top of just a bunch of disks. That's why it surprises me when you say you have trouble because the drives in your raid system isn't fast enough to keep up for read operations.

Yeah even the slowest of raids should be able to keep up. I used to have a dlink 343 ages ago that would read at around ~15MB/sec, and it could stream two blurays at the same time. Two at one time should be fine even for a 100megabit network.

 

[patsu]

Well for that I don't transcode, I make mobile encodes using Pavtube. I've made mobile version of about 8 movies so that I could put them on my phone and my wife's ipad. It's literally a two step process, drag the single video file from any bluray rip to the program, then click button. Presto, mobile version pops out on other end. So I have a few movie favorites always on my phone.

Yes, and that process is called transcoding ! ^_^

Reread what I wrote. I have had no problems streaming multiple full bit-rate blurays even from the same physical drive off my media server. I was able to stream 4 movies at the same time without any hiccups. I couldn't test more because I ran out of client systems to use.

There's nothing special with my setup, it's just a union filesystem on top of just a bunch of disks. That's why it surprises me when you say you have trouble because the drives in your raid system isn't fast enough to keep up for read operations.

Yeah even the slowest of raids should be able to keep up. I used to have a dlink 343 ages ago that would read at around ~15MB/sec, and it could stream two blurays at the same time. Two at one time should be fine even for a 100megabit network.

My home NAS box only has 2 2Tb drives in it since I want to keep my home infrastructure cheap. And I did it over WiFi since we want to keep our living room as cable free as possible. I think this is the average household setup. For highend setup, then yes... it's in my office, maintained by my sysadmins. ^_^ In both the low end and high end setups, I use DLNA differently.

I also experimented with moving my videos between the systems and watched them on PS3 transcoded on-the-fly by the Mac. Since I seldom do transcoding (at home), when it starts up, the server will also try to index the folders, stash the converted video, and generate thumbnails for the media collection at the same time. If it's straight streaming, it's not so interesting technically.

I also searched and edited my family video collection on the NAS box. When browsing the collection, it's not uncommon to watch my files appear slowly in Mac OSX or PS3. ^_^

 

[joker454]

Yes, and that process is called transcoding ! ^_^

Ah, I consider transcoding more of the realtime variety, ie the conversion process happens right when you play it and its transcoded to a format your device supports. Doing it ahead of time is just plain old re-encoding to me.

 

[patsu]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcoding#Re-encoding.2Frecoding

Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital data conversion of one encoding to another,[1] such as for movie data files or audio files. This is usually done in cases where a target device (or workflow) does not support the format or has limited storage capacity that mandates a reduced file size,[1] or to convert incompatible or obsolete data to a better-supported or modern format.

It doesn't have to be real time. In addition, the Blu-ray stream has much more complex video frames than what the gadgets can handle even if the final format remains as H.264.

 

[-tkf-]

Yeah at some point regular raid units just become too tough to use if they don't have fast transfer rates to go with it. Aside from blurays I also use the synology as a backup for all my video work that I do and keep copies of the same footage on hdd's at the bank. The darned thing is already 45% full, kinda scary how much space video data needs!

My biggest worry is raid corruption and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Data_Integrity, that is why i am looking at ZFS and i hope future NAS solutions will do the same.

 

[jonabbey]

I'm doing DLNA (mediatomb) of DVD rips from an i7 920 Linux server using a pair of mirrored discs, works flawlessly to PS3 over a gigabit ethernet link , and also over wi-fi to my Android tablet running Bubble UPnP.

Patsu, you say that HTTP streaming works better than DLNA for you? How does that work out? Isn't DLNA already HTTP based?