Some home media advice today: the goal is to make the ideal streaming solution from your computer/pogoplug to your PS3 (no more copying files and plugging in the USB stick into the PS3.
(FYI - I'll talk about a pogoplug in a future post. I just got it and it has a tonne of potential. Basically, and hard drive you connect to the pogoplug (up to 4 via USB, and you can add more with a USB hub), and you can connect your DROBO to it as well) - I have a DROBO second generation 4 bay with 4 2 terabyte Western Digital Caviar Green EARS or EADS drives, giving me a total of almost 6 terabytes of usable space. As well, I have a seagate freeagent Go with 880 gb so that I can take the TV shows with me when I need to)
Ideally, everything should be connected through your router with ethernet cables. No matter what they say about wireless N, it will never compete with the wired option. It is noticeably faster, and your streaming will get the best results.
Having said that, if you only download shows that are approximately 150 mb for 30 minute shows and 350 mb for 1 hour shows, and the files end in .avi, then you will have no trouble streaming no matter what the connection. As well, you can search through the shows on your PS3 relatively easily. These show's do look good in HD, although the bigger the screen, the more noticeable the artifacts (blocky looking parts occasionally).
I connect my imac 27 inch quad-core and my macbook pro to my PS3 using the program medialink. This program costs only 20 dollars, can be installed on both my machines as a preference pane, has frequent updates, and lets you see all the videos, itunes music and iphoto/aperture pictures. It is simplicity. It also will do your transcoding for you in case you can't get your MKV files into MP4 files to be played natively.
Videos that are being transcoded unfortunately are not easily searchable (fast forward, reverse, scene selection, etc.).
Searching through a video on a ps3 is easy. Pushing the left stick to the right changes playback from 1x to 1.5x to 10x to 30x to 120x, with the opposite for reverse. The best way to go through a video is with the square button. This pulls up a bar on the bottom of the screen with 1 minute intervals and previews to help you decide where to go. You can push up to switch to 2 minute and 5 minute intervals. The select button will pull up display information so you know where you are in the show. The triangle button pulls up a whole whack of options. Finally, the x button always jumps your show back into play or pause, and the circle button takes you out of a menu or quits a show. The last feature - if you accidently quit a show and restart it (as long as it can be played natively and doesn't need transcoding), you jump back in right where you left off.
Now with medialink you can transcode videos, but it takes a big toll on your computer and on the ability to search through movies - any hitch in the system can cause a glitch. Therefore, the ideal method for the PS3 is to change the format to MP4. There are two main ways to do this:
The first, and easiest, is with high definition TV shows that you download in MKV format - typically one hour shows are just over 1 gb in size.
Take your MKV files, open in Quicktime 7 - once it's done loading, go to file->export
for export settings, choose:
Export - movie to MPEG-4
Go to options:
Video Format - Pass through
Audio: AAC-LC, data rate 128 kbps, channels stereo, 44.100 KHz, encoding better
Streaming - DO NOT click enable streaming
This should work for all the television shows that you download. Why do this? It changes the file to MP4, which can play natively on the PS3 - so if you are streaming it your computer doesn't need to transcode it. If your computer doesn't need to transcode than it's not a lost cause to search through it - but what you should do is use the square button to bring up the 1 minute interval previews, and then go that way - don't do fast forward or reverse - it's not precise enough. Finally, once you get your drobo attached to a pogoplug you can actually play these files.
It doesn't work for the movies you download (their video is a little too much, audio too much I think). Those have to be done with Visual hub or other programs
Why this is faster is that it doesn't actually change the file but rather just changes the container (MKV to MP4). Unfortunately, you can't just rename this in the finder - you have to do this.
The Second, and more complex option applies to movies and files that the above solution does not work for. You know it will not work if you cannot just pass through the video format. For these ones you need a program such as visualhub that will re-encode the video. This process is much more complex and fraught with error so will be dealt with later (if people would like to know).
And that's it! It seems like a lot of work initially, but if you work through it step by step your system will be up and running with no more hassle, no more copying files, just straight streaming, all the time. As well, you can even use this to copy the file to the PS3 in case you know the network is going to be down - that way you still don't need to use USB keys. Cheers everyone!
Nicholas
