Null Disquisition

New toys bring new adventures. My awesome wife got me a PS3 for my birthday recently and I’ve been tinkering around with getting some non-Bluray HD content to play on it. My initial attempts to stream stuff over my network proved unsatisfying. Since the PS3 is only capable of 802.11g, I gave up on the high bitrate stuff (it’s perfectly capable of DVD quality content (1.5~2.5 Mb/s).

Software used (on Mac OS X 10.5):

• tsMuxer
• Disk Utility
• newfs_udf
• hdiutil

Hardware used:

• Macbook Pro
• Blank CD/DVD Media
• PS3

Files used: * MKV file with AC3 audio stream and H264 video stream

Attempt 1 (successful): Load the MKV with tsMuxerGUI, select M2TS muxing. If the video profile is above 4.1, lower it to 4.1 (as the PS3 cannot support higher than an H264 level 4.1). Generate the m2ts and meta file, burn them both to a CD/DVD. This will be readable by the PS3 as a data disk – it will not autoplay, but you can access it and play it. To me, this is not an ideal solution as it does not support menus, chapters, or seeking.

Attempt 2 (unsuccessful): Same deal as before, but select “AVCHD disk”. This option will create a BD friendly file structure (folders named BDMV and CERTIFICATE). The trick here is to burn the disk as UDF 2.5 (this is not super easy on OS X or Linux). I wasted many CDs trying to regular ISO9660. Following the instructions here, you must create the image and format it as UDF 2.5.

dd if=/dev/zero of=myfile.img bs=1k count=716800
newfs_udf -r 2.5 myfile.img -v volume_label
hdiutil mount -nobrowse myfile.img
cp -R /path/to/avcdh-files/ /Volume/volume_label/
hdiutil unmount /Volume/volume_label

In plain-speak, create an empty (large) image, format it to UDF 2.5, mount it, copy the BD-compatible files into the volume, and unmount. You then use Disk Utility to burn the resulting image. No success here, but at this point I was so close, I could taste it.

Attempt 3 (successful): Identical procedure as Attempt 2, with one important exception – the image you create with dd must be sized in even increments of 1GB – that is, count==N*1024*1024.

A few things to try next:

• Menus
• DTS audio stream
• Subtitles

Anyone wanting to test this out with a super high quality 1080p rip, I recommend Big Buck Bunny. You’ll need Handbrake to convert it to a compatible container format if you download the AVI (tsMuxer doesn’t like AVIs).