Matroska support?

[scxzor]

Hi,

I absolutely love using PS3 Video 9. The files I've created (1080p @ AVC, 8mbps) look absolutely fantastic. The Matroska format (MKV) is becoming increasingly popular, and it appears as if Red Kawa does not support decoding this format. Are there plans to make this available in the future?

Thanks for everything!

- Andrew Yoon

[acidraven]

I think the main problem with adding support for other formats is that PS3 video9 is basically a front end for a commandline program FFmepg. MKV also has other things like subtitles that are a pain to deal with because they are soft (removable and put on by software). VirtualDUB mod can open some MKV files, and as long as you take out the other audio /subtitles steams from the steam selector you can save to to an AVI quickly using direct copy. There are also some programs for pulling apart the mkv files and it should be possible to then quickly put them together in a AVI that can be encoded with Video 9. the real problem comes if you have subtitles because that requires you to encode the video again to add the subtitles to the image.

Now if anyone knows of a faster way, uses less programs, knows of a program that takes care of all of that, is knows what they are doing and can write a program to do it. I am sure that everyone would love to hear it. but that is one of the major problems with videos, there are just so many formats, so most programs just deal with avi, going to avi or taking a avi and converting it to an other format.

[scxzor]

Thanks for the detailed response, acidraven. You seem to know a bit more about the format than I do: is there any easy way to extract the audio and video stream from a MKV file to turn it into an AVI file? Maybe I can do this conversion first, and then plop it into PS3 Video 9.

[acidraven]

Virtualdub mod can open some mkv's, I tried to give directions above. Right now it is late and it is new years. so Hopefully I will remember and try to write a better tutorial next week. And honestly I don't know that much I have just been converting video to my psp for the past year and have one good resource to look things up, and I keep posting it in messages I think I am going to add it to my sig so I don't have to type it any more. <LOL> But it is Videohelp.com I have probably been looking at the site as it has evolved over the past 5 years when I had a really bad computer but had a dvd player that could play vcd's so I downloaded anime and converted them and then watched them on my tv.

Other things I can think of off the top of my head is to experiment, back up your files and that restricting the amount of video that you encode is your friend.

[Megagold5]

Currently, I use a program I found called alltoAVI http://alltoavi.sourceforge.net/ That should work for most mkv or ogm files

Guide using virtualdubmod to convert .mkv or .ogm to .avi: http://forum.videohelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=241422

You can aslo extract the audio and video with mkvextractor then rejoin them in virtual dub, but I found that with some mkv files you end up with video slower than the audio, which buggers up the syncing. It may work with some mkv files, not sure.

For the second method above:
MKVExtractGUI to extract video, audio and subtitle from MKV files.
After that continue from the Multiplex/Join the video,audio in the 1st guide above. But you must first convert the ogg audio to mp3, you can use for example dbpoweramp.

[cozdiver]

PS3 Video 9 can't even convert AVIs to Mpeg for me. I have AVI files taken straight out of my Fujifilm camera, common stuff, and it couldn't convert, just went to Completion almost immediately. I tried every profile even change resolutions and bitrates all to no avail. I finally had to use Windows Movie Maker to convert to WMV. Did not like do so as quality was lost. Largest bitrate was 2.1 MBPS for 640 x 480. File was a quarter the size of the AVI. Anyway, PS3 Video 9 converted that and with some difficulty was finally able to get it to stream to PS3 where it was saved.
Before WMV I tried converting AVI to DV-AVI and it did convert but the audio sounded like everyone was talking like chipmunks, LOL.