EasyLinuxGuide Blog

One of the great things about the PS3 is the powerful processor which among other things, will allow for more cpu intensive and larger video files to play. Although Sony has improved their support for various codecs (DivX 4/5 and recently better Divx 3 support was added), it still will not play all of your video files.

If you happen to have any video files that are 720p and in an MKV (mastoska video) container, you will soon find out that your PS3 will not play them.

There are various arguments on the net about using MKV as a video container. Apparently it offers a bit more versatility in terms of encoding options so the vast majority of hi-res videos are done in the .mkv file extension.

I found a fast and easy way to fix this problem. I use a program called MKV2VOB. Unfortunately it only seems to work well enough in Windows. I tried it in Wine but it wouldn’t even open properly. If anyone knows of an app that will work in Linux the same way, then please let me know.

Another catch is that I find this only works well with 720p files. Essentially what the app does it change the container which the video is within. So, if you have an mkv file that you know won’t work on your PS3 (yes, I did try transcoding from a media server but the power required must be astronomical because my dual core AMD 3500 with 4gb ram couldn’t play these files. All you need to do is load up MKV2VOB and then open your file and select a destination where you want your redone video placed. I did not change any default settings at all.  Essentially it is doing is changing the container from mkv to mpeg. It does not need to transcode to do this. It only will Mux the video so that it is in a different container. I find it takes only about 30 seconds at most for a video even of around 4gb size. Note – this is the result only for 720p resolutions or lower. If you want to change the container for a video file with 1080p resolution, it seems to require transcoding which is a very long process in comparison. I have not noticed any 720p files that required transcoding yet. The resulting file should be an mpeg file and should play just fine on your PS3 while still retaining the same resolution and quality including the sound.

I am hoping that newer versions of MKV2VOB will work better with 1080p videos but at least it makes all of those 720p mkv files useful for PS3 owners.

I did try to play some of these videos through PS3 Media Server and have it transcode on the fly, but my CPU on my server was not powerful enough to do so. With my dual core machine with 4gb ram not being able to properly play a larger mkv container file without slowing down or clipping, it makes me curious as to what would be necessary to play these files with mkv container files.

Hopefully this post can save some people some of the time and trial and error I went through to figure things out. Better yet, hopefully down the road we will get a better container that offers all of the same benefits of mkv but also has better compatibility and doesn’t seem to require such vast amounts of CPU power to play.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Personal Rants, Picture Shows / TV, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.