A comparison of PS3 and 360 as media players

Yeah I used to run MediaTomb on my old NAS box. If you don't transcode and only stream video in a straightforward manner, then it should be fine.

What resolution do you use for your Android tablet ? (720p ?)

I was hoping Sony would extend its DLNA foundation further, but no dice so far. e.g., Cache video/image thumbnails locally and animate them as if the files are kept locally. This would provide a much smoother navigation experience.

I remember testing DLNA and XMB videos with RemotePlay. The unprotected ones would play fine. But the protected ones can't be played.

Yes DLNA is built on top of HTTP.

On the PS3, if you use the old web browser to download a video, it will be treated as a progressive download movie. You would see a custom movie controller and could play the video while it is being downloaded via HTTP. FF and REW work like a file-based seek, so it's fast and consistent. When you seek beyond the download boundary, the browser would try to keep up (Move your seek head further as it downloads more bytes). I have not tested this use case with the new browser.

I used to run a DLNA server and a web server pointing to my media directory at the same time.


In DLNA, the media controller is part of the protocol. The client sends high level "seek" commands to the DLNA server (at the app and HTTP level). In my experience, it's much slower and less predictable (Could hang your PS3 if you seek too aggressively, like 30x). I remember Sony improved the performance somewhat, but the last time I checked -- which is years ago -- the HTTP approach is still more reliable.

 

Ah. I've had no problems at all with mediatomb. 120x ff/rw, it all works fine.

I've got a Galaxy Tab, 1280x800, but the files I'm streaming are all SD DVD rips.

 

I use PS3 Media Server for DLNA over a wired network. It is running on an old core2duo laptop with USB2 HDDs.

When I did the stress test using an NTSC res xvid AVI file, I had it streaming the same file to 3 wired PS3s, one wifi laptop and two iphones.

I was pretty impressed.

I have to convert all my media because of the need to have subtitles. Although the burnt in route would be simpler, I want to be able to toggle them. On the PS3 the only way to stream media with toggleable subtitles is with Xvid/Dvix AVI encode and container.

The key to making PS3 Media Server work with lots of data is by having a lot of folders/subfolders.

A nice by product of sticking with xvid/avi is that this media ff/rw and supports the PS3 thumbnail filmstrip view really well.

Xvid is getting a bit long in the tooth, but for DVD encodes, where file size is not an issue, it does an okay job. With Blu-ray, because the source is so good, xvid is fine for creating 1280x720 versions for streaming.

 

Yeah, that's the shortfall I hope Sony fix.

Browsing a large number of files with thumbnails over the net is slow. Their apps (e.g., Filmy) only support media on the local HDD.

PlayMemories supposedly has PSN cloud support, but I bet it's still going to deal with the local HDD only.

Families usually keep their media on a PC, Mac or NAS storage.

FaceBook integration is nice in Photo Gallery but it's hidden too deep in the app.

What we need is a hybrid approach: Work with remote media, but cache the thumbnails and working set on the local HDD.

 

A nice critical Blu-Ray article, covers some interesting aspects about Cinevia protection and how Blu-Ray is slowly killing itself.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5693/...top-worrying-and-love-blurays-selfdestruction

 

Really nice piece. No surprise the conclusion was that....shocker....DRM hurts the actual consumers and not the pirates.

 

Yeah it's actually the really long load times, fbi warnings, forced trailers, long tedious menu's, wrong default audio chosen, slow bda features, etc that actually drove me to use Anydvdhd years ago. I love the actual movie content on bluray's but I hate blurays themselves, they are a terribly inconvenient format to watch movies on. My wife has tried 3 times to watch an actual bluray disc over the years, every time she complained that it's just too slow and tedious and no longer bothers, hence I've ripped all her blurays to raid along with the rest of them. I even recall once in a video store the salesman loading a bluray to demonstrate to a customer, it took so long to load that his kids started running around the couch yelling "loading loading" to amuse themselves, it was quite adorable really. Eventually the customer just walked away kids in tow. I don't understand why they hobble the format like this, people just need be able to put in the disc and the movie appears. I keep my rips original quality but I know of countless people that reduce their quality to save space, and this degraded version is still prefereable to watch to them than the actual bluray disc because the disc is beyond tedious to actually use.

 

We tried. Got stabbed in the back by Warner for our pains. An average Universal HD-DVD time to first menu on XBox and HD-A3: 18 seconds or less. We even offered our interactivity stack to the BDA (And Sony was in favor of it, since it closely resembled their PSP movie menu stack) but anti-microsoft sentiment in a few of the other players caused them to go with Sun's Java. Reading the minutes of the BDA meetings was quite an education, let me tell you. Blu-Ray originally had no interactivity stack at all until they realized they had to have one to compete with HD-DVD and woo Disney.

 

Interesting, always cool to hear backstory tales. Shame those minutes aren't public Yeah it really shows that bluray's interactivity stack was added more in haste because it's quite appaling in it's functionality. But as slow and crude as blurays menus, etc, are i think that's only one of the ways they are shooting themselves in the head ultimately. Forced trailers, etc just kill the experience. I wonder, has anyone else here done the spouse test? Like have your wife sit down a play a bluray disc, then have her play a bluray rip. I wonder would she prefer the < 1 second startup time direct to movie of a bluray rip, or would they be tolerant of a typical bluray disc? Or worse yet like once when my wife hit the stop button by accident while playing a bluray disc and she had to rerun the disc and go through the entire load process all over again, she was like "screw this" lol and just abandoned it. I sometimes think execs, etc are just living in a differnet world and they don't realize people have other options now. I'll admit that even though I'm a graphics whore and extremely picky about picture quality, if Anydvd didn't exist then I probably would not use blurays at all and would just stick with netflix or some other instant to movie format. I just can't stomach actually playing a bluray disc. The only reason I have 153 bluray movies is because of Anydvd.

 

While I certainly dont like the nagging before the movie, its now as bad as you make it out to be. I also quite like some of the PIP features which eg. show the correct "behind the scenes" during the movie, something the rips lack.
Also I can just resume my movie where I stopped, not going through menus and warnings (happens a few times since I cant remember the correct buttons on my DS3 controller).

But then I wont ever in a million years buy a Disney movie just because of the reasons you mentioned, those are really offensive with the crap you have to go through - and that were DVDs I bought years ago.

So in short, BD by design aint retarded, Disney and other publishers are.

 

The ironic thing is that despite you having 153 BD movies, many in the industry would consider what you're doing to be "wrong".

I just hope SlySoft can keep out of any legal troubles.

 

Can all blurays resume now? There was a time only 1.0 movies could resume, but movies that used more advanced bluray 2.0 features did not support resume. The nagging I guess depends on the movie, but wrong audio also used to drive me nuts. Why would I buy a bluray to listen to a 15+ year old dolby digital soundtrack when the truehd soundtrack was available? I still do hate the menu's though, it just seems all so tedious to me, but then again I just want to hit play and instantly be in the movie. But I'm also the type that I won't watch live tv because I can't tolerate 30 seconds of ads, I guess I have little patience for delays forced in my face.

Hmm that makes me wonder, even though all my movies are bought and sitting on a bookshelf right behind me, I do make some mobile encodes from them to enjoy on the go for no extra charge. I think hollywood wants me to be paying for that, so makes me wonder is what I'm doing even legal? Or if I have guests in my house it's entirely possible they are watching the same bluray rip as me but in different rooms at the same time, is that legal? Who knows I guess.

 

And I dont even have the patience to sit through whole movies, so I usually pause them a few times
At home I havent watched live TV for years, but primary because I`d want to watch when I want and not being fixed to air times, having stop and rewind, and the option of original language and subtitles. German synchro can be horrible, and often you get some horribly cut version on TV.. I remember watching a Van Damme movie with every fight being cut partially or even totally (VD walks towards an almost naked guy in a empty pool, cut, VD walk out of it with spectators cheering - I still dont know if it was a porn or action movie as the plot was thin enough for either)

you mean after they had to move to Antigua because of legal troubles?

 

As for Blu-Ray speed, a lot of that really comes from the publisher..

Tried Blade Runner

20 secs FBI warning
35 secs movie starts (WB LOGO)

Starting the movie again from XMB no FBI warning after 21-22 secs movie plays from where i left it.

TRON Legacy:
32 Language Menu
39 Disney logo (skipped)
XX Trailers, skipped.. Menu loading
1:25:00 pressed play movie

On the second run the Language Menu was 7 secs faster and i could press play some 1:15 (i learned how to skip)

It should be said that this is all on a PS3.

 

Tron asks if i want to resume from where i left off, and here is a fun part, i think the last time i had this disc in a PS3 it was in my Fat, so that data was transferred to my new slim..

 

PS3 also has some preferred audio settings that seem to mean I usually get the right audio settings.

I also got pretty skilled at skipping during the openings. Most can be skipped with next chapter (R1) and then at some point you can click main menu (square)

I agree that unskippable logos and trailers are borderline criminal, but they only bother me for movies my son likes to watch over and over and fortunately not all movies are equally bad. I think the amount of time and effort I spend on that is likely to always be less than some people spend on setting up an alternative system

What also doesn't give me many alternatives is the amount of language options:

me: original audio track, no subtitles
me + wife: original audio, english fir the hearing impaired
me + guests: original audio, dutch subs
son or other kids: dutch audio dubs, no subs

And that's just for English films.

But it is still bad that some companies don't understand we buy some of their products because we want to watch them more than twice, and that second time logos and trailers are just bad design.

 

Just fyi that's trivial to do with rips. For example I kept german audio and english audio on Run Lola Run, kept english audio and english subtitles on the Godfather movies, etc. The entire ripping process is so easy now.

 

what are you using for playback?
both my PS3 and LG TV have various weaknesses streaming videos, my TV doesnt support DTS audio and only supports subtitles/multiple audio from USB. My PS3 aint supporting mkv or subtitles at all.

I know I could buy a dedicated streamer like "WDTV live", but until every DLNA device fully supports rips like these its painful to have extra devices just for playback.

 

Mostly a Popcorn Hour C-200, but any pc will work as well. The Popcorn Hour supports blurays out of the box so I get original video stream quality and untouched hd audio quality as well. On pc you do need software to play back the rips, I used to use Total Media Theater. That works perfectly, but I mostly just use the C-200 now. It comes out of sleep mode in 1 second, and launches any bluray movie likewise in 1 second. It supports bluray menu's as well so if you got lazy and just dumped the bluray to raid with one click from anydvd, then the c-200 would play it complete with menus. I actually do keep the menus on music concerts since they are usefull there to know what chapter each song is on, but for movies i strip it all away. I bought that unit many years ago, so I presume there are other units out there that do the same thing now. A bonus on the Popcorn Hour unit is that you can shove a bluray drive in it and play discs if that's how you roll. I had a spare drive lying around so I put one in there and it works, although I don't use it much.

 

Yeah I've had software that can do that for a while for DVD, but what if all of these are necessary for the same movie?