PS3 as Media Centre - mplayer discussion

Message

smurfgun · Post by **smurfgun** » Fri Feb 01, 2008 6:00 pm

Hi all,

I am very new to the scene of Linux on PS3. The primary reason I got the PS3 was the ability to install Linux and turn it into a media centre. I have a bunch of media on a Windows share that I would like to access and display on my TV. Here are my requirements for the media centre.

- WiFi
- Nice GUI
- Play *all* media formats that a PC can play (rmvb and mkv is important)

I debated over small form factor PCs, mac mini, and PS3. I decided on PS3 because of the price and the side benefit of bluray and gaming station. In fact, I've had the PS3 for a week and haven't played a game yet.

It took me a long time but I was able to get the following going

- Gentoo
- MythTV/MythVideo (frontend only)
- Optimized mplayer (http://wiki.ps2dev.org/ps3:mediacenter)
- Freevo

Anyway, although I don't have WPA going yet, I have satisfied the WiFi and GUI requirements. Now I need mplayer to do its job and this is where the problem has come in.

- The "unoptimized" mplayer can play x264 but it complains the CPU is too slow and the video becomes jerky
- The optimized mplayer does not have support for x264
- Either way, I can't get it to play rmvb files (i download the essential codec pack from mplayer website but it was still a no go. Possibly I installed it wrong but I just placed the files in /usr/lib/codecs and tried /usr/local/lib/codecs as well)

Does anybody have some good experience using mplayer with rmvb and mkv in gentoo?

Thanks,

DaNe · Post by **DaNe** » Fri Feb 01, 2008 6:33 pm

for media center check this:http://www.linuxmce.org/

are you using the right vo? mplayer -vo help (i suggest gl*)

try to use cache and framedrop

in last case nice is good to.

matroska and x264 flag do you have it?
for rmvb i dont know

smurfgun · Post by **smurfgun** » Fri Feb 01, 2008 7:04 pm

Thanks for the reply

I use -vo x11, I didn't know any others will work. I've tried using cache but it doesn't solve the problem. Framedrop seems to cause blocks of frames to be dropped and makes the video pretty bad.

Are you using linux mce on the PS3? I would be interested to know someone's comment on it.

So, matroska and x264 do play on mplayer. It just complains that the CPU is too slow and the video because jerky.

Have you been successful in running mkv/x264 on the ps3?

Thanks,

DaNe · Post by **DaNe** » Fri Feb 01, 2008 7:07 pm

i dont have ps3, i simply showed you the one of the bests media centers build based in linux , ask them if they give you support for your ps3.

try another -vo really...

darkphader · Post by **darkphader** » Fri Feb 01, 2008 7:10 pm

I had Linux installed on my PS3 but without accelerated graphics support the results were unacceptable for HD video playback.
So now I use the PS3 OS and Mediatomb (svn version) on my 'nix box to serve up the files. Mediatomb works quite nicely and handles transcoding of file formats that the PS3 doesn't natively play.

Chris

smurfgun · Post by **smurfgun** » Fri Feb 01, 2008 7:21 pm

darkphader wrote:I had Linux installed on my PS3 but without accelerated graphics support the results were unacceptable for HD video playback.
So now I use the PS3 OS and Mediatomb (svn version) on my 'nix box to serve up the files. Mediatomb works quite nicely and handles transcoding of file formats that the PS3 doesn't natively play.

Chris

Do you stream this over WiFi or ethernet?

Unfortunately the gameos doesn't have buffering capabilities and streaming over WiFi (802.11g) doesn't work that well.

Thanks,

darkphader · Post by **darkphader** » Fri Feb 01, 2008 8:12 pm

smurfgun wrote:Do you stream this over WiFi or ethernet?

GbE :)

sensee · Post by **sensee** » Thu Feb 28, 2008 2:02 pm

darkphader wrote:I had Linux installed on my PS3 but without accelerated graphics support the results were unacceptable for HD video playback.
So now I use the PS3 OS and Mediatomb (svn version) on my 'nix box to serve up the files. Mediatomb works quite nicely and handles transcoding of file formats that the PS3 doesn't natively play.

Chris

Hi, i just installed MT this morning after i found this post, would you mind sharing your conf if you have one working with transcoding and the PS3.
Please!

while1 · Post by **while1** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 3:24 pm

Check out this HOWTO... It should be enough.

http://da.gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_MediaTo ... ng_Support

CSchiewek · Post by **CSchiewek** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 5:05 am

Excellent thread gentlemen. I'm having issues getting MKV transcodes to work... Would someone be willing to toss me a config that's working with MKV?

Many thanks...

DirtyHairy · Post by **DirtyHairy** » Mon Mar 10, 2008 11:47 am

I don't own a PS3, but as I have been thinking about getting one sometime I poked around a bit, so here's my 5 cent:

1) I would assume that the PPU itself is more than fast enough for video decoding, being a PowerPC clocked at 3.2 GHz with altivec (make sure that this is enabled in mplayer configure). However, video is unaccelerated (the RSX is not accessible beyond framebuffer mode in linux), so scaling and colorspace conversion have to be done by mplayer on the PPU which can consume a huge amount of processor time. SPE medialib offloads this to the SPEs, so be sure to use this patch together with the -vo ps3 option (-vo gl2 or anything else apart from -vo x11 won't work). However, according to ps2dev.org, even then h.264 won't work (I don't understand why though as I would assume the combination of PPU and SPU medialib to be more than fast enough to handle the task).

2) Some formats are supported by mplayer only through binary windows codecs (the "essential" codec package). These won't work on anything non-x86, more specifically they won't work on a PowerPC, so tough luck there