Supported Video Formats?

[fastfall]

On your Feature page for Media Center X, its states "PS3 Media Center X lets you stream and watch videos in the Flash video format (FLV) on your PS3".

Does this mean all video must be converted before it can be played?

In particular, I am looking to stream my High Definition home videos extracted from my Sony HC1 video camera (Mpeg 2 Transport stream), from my PC to the PS3 across the wired ethernet connection. Can your software do this?

[cozdiver]

You should be able to transfer MPEG-2 videos without converting. I have to convert mine from AVI to WMV to MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 to get it to work. It may stream flv but doesn't mean that's the only type of file extension it will stream. If you would, let me know if the files straight out of the Sony camera can be streamed. I'm looking to buy a camera that can creates a file that is streamable immediately without going thru the conversion process. Can you do editing with that camera, either in camera of with provided software in a PC? Good luck

[fastfall]

I will - if I can ever get this server to run. It keeps coming up with a 0.5.x.x address ....

[fastfall]

Finally got the server running.
I copied my High Definition .m2t file into the videos directory
(C:\Program Files\Utils\Video\Media Servers\Red Kawa Media Center\software\Video\videos)

When I browsed my videos from the PS3 - nothing showed up. I got crafty and renamed the file on my PC to a .flv extension. Now it shows up on the PS3, but ....

It won't play it. The PS3 will play this file (I played it directly from a DVD and it played beautifully). It just won't play across the network.

I suspect every video has to be in FLV format.

This post by Colin seems to back that up:
http://www.redkawa.com/forums/showthread.php?t=328

I also tried using the "files" menu to access the file directly, and it just wanted to save it to my PS3 hard drive.

To the folks at red kawa:
I would pay decent money for this software (And I am willing to donate and be a tester if you guys are listening) if it would allow me to do the following:
- stream .m2t files extracted from my Sony HDR HC1 video camera without transcoding of any kind
- play them in full screen, not in a web browser window
- stream files that are larger than 4GB
- support consecutive file playback without interaction (ie play each file in the directory specified one after the other without any user input)

Otherwise ... no good to me.

My current dillema with the PS3 is that it only supports FAT32 usb drives (not NTFS), which means a 4GB file size limitation. So I cannot plug a removable drive directly into the PS3 and play my HD video (most HD video files are way bigger than 4GB). Sony amazes me that they put these limitations on such a supposedly high tech device. I mean - you can't even play the video files from one sony device - the HDR-HC1 video camera on another sony device - the PS3 because of a silly filesystem limitation. Thats just dumb. Hopefully the big March firmware update that they have been hinting at will contain solutions to some of these issues. I would kill for NTFS support, or even better - network mapped drive support, be in NAS, or samaba or whatever. The xbox 360 already has media center extender capabilities out of the box. Sony does not. If Sony wants to compete - THEY GOTTA ADD IT IN.

And if the guys at red kawa want to compete in the mean time, they better beat sony to the punch. Otherwise, when sony does add media extender like capabilities - this software will be pretty much worthless.

Thanks for listening guys!

[Colin]

Hi fastfall,

I hear you loud and clear and have the same beefs with PS3 as you do. The FAT32 size limitation is particularly annoying. As for streaming videos, the RK team has thought about how we could go about this but have not been able to come up with a solution yet.

I haven’t have not gotten around to it yet but you might consider installing Linux on your PS3. It could be your best bet to achieve some of your goals. I have seen a few Gentoo install guides around net. Just a thought! If you try it let me know how it goes :)

Thanks for your interest and suggestions.

Colin
-Red Kawa Developer

[fastfall]

Cool - thanks for the info guys!

[mike21222]

I have found that by Converting the video with Video 9, now I can transfer the video to the PS3. But when I try to view it it gives an error that it contains unsupported format. However it does then go on and show the Video, and it is in HD. Unfortunatley the Sound does not work. Is there a setting I can tweak to get the audio to work? Does the PS3 have limitations on audio format specifically for video playback? I can play my MP3's fine.
I am using a Seagate 160GB USB backup for external HDD. I had to reformat the drive from NTFS to FAT32 in 32GB chunks. They don;t come NTFS, I reformatted it before knowing that I would be uding it this way. I was not aware of the 4GB limitation.