How To Play HD Content on Your PS3 [Guide]

Looking to play HD content (Movies etc) on Your PS3? Here’s an awesome guide written by AudioBoxer which lets you play HD Files (.MKV), tackling it with NO/minimal quality loss. Normally HD movies are in GB’s but you don’t have to worry about that, PS3 can support drives up to 350GB and you can keep your favorite movies in it easily.

To play HD Content on your PS3, you’ll be needed

• PS3 (PlayStation 3)
• PC
• Java SE Runtime Environment (Download version x64 if you are on 64bit, install this before PS3MS)
• PS3 Media Server (works on Linux/Windows/Mac)

Setting Up PS3 Media Server

The first screen you will see is the status screen.

If working correctly PS3 Media Server will detect your PS3. For this to happen both your PC and PS3 must be turned on, and connected to your router or modem.

If there is a problem you will see this screen. The most common cause for this is a firewall on your PC blocking either the PS3 Media Server application or JAVA. Both have to be whitelisted within your firewall application.

The traces tab will act as your debug log, it is helpful to read it if you are experiencing the second image above, as it may give clues as to why your PS3 and PC aren’t talking to each other.

The first useful thing to notice here is you can install PS3 MS as a Windows Service. This will enable your media sharing every time you turn your PS3 on. You could always just add a shortcut to the PS3MS exe under your startup folder though.

Ignore the network settings unless you’re having issues getting your PC to talk to your PS3, you can force an IP for the server here if you need to manually open a port on your router.

Enable the HTTPV2 engine, and prevent OS from sleeping while streaming so your power saving features don’t kick in and put your PC in standby whilst you’re watching a movie.

Turn on thumbnails generation, use mplayer for video thumbnails and also DVD ISOs thumbnails. The Thumbnail seeking position can be set to whatever time you want. This creates a thumbnail from the actual video.

Audio thumbails can be gathered from various sources, the drop down box lists the likes of Amazon.

Protip – PS3 Media Server supports custom thumbnails from your hard drive if you’d rather use something else other than a snapshot from the video. If you save an image as ‘folder.png’ in the same folder as your video file it will use that. An example:

On PC

On PS3

The PSD file with the template for the cover art I use can be downloaded here. Credits to Neowin member Boz for creating the template.

Navigation/Parsing settings contains various visual tweaks you can accustom yourself to. The #Video Settings# and #Transcode# folder hold very useful settings depending on your streaming needs, browse these folders on your PS3 to see. For example:

#Transcode Folder#

When enabled this folder will let you customize your file playback. If you have dual audio options or subtitles to choose from, you can go into this folder and select what you want.

If however for example all your movies are in english/don’t need subtitles you can hide the #Transcode Folder# to clean up your menus.

The Shared folders section is where your movies are located.

Protip – With HD movies taking up 10’s of GB of space at times, many of us may have our movies spanned across multiple drives. When it comes to browsing your files this can be a pain, as they aren’t all shown in the one location under PS3 MS and you may forget what drive has what movies. There is a very easy and efficient solution, Linkshell Extension.

Install Linkshell Extension for your operating system. Afterwards you will notice new entries on your context menu called ‘Pick Link Source’

This is used to specify what file or folder you want to create a virtual link to. Look at this scenario below:

Here we have two movies, but both these movies are on separate drives. In order to play them both back through PS3 Media Server, we’d have to add both locations to our Shared Folders section and browse them on our PS3 separately.

What we can do now is create one centralised folder, say C:\Movies. We would right click on one of our two movie folders above and hit ‘Pick Link Source’. We would then navigate to our C:\Movies folder and right click, go to ‘Drop As’, then ‘Symbolic Link Clone’.

Do this for both folders and you’ll have this scenario

We have now created two virtual shortcuts to our actual movies within C:\Movies. Since they are shortcuts as you can see they occupy ‘0kb’. This can be done with folders or files.

If you’re now wondering why we didn’t just create an ‘everyday’ windows right click, paste shortcut, it’s because such shortcuts won’t work in PS3MS.

On your PS3 you will have your ‘Movies’ folder browsable as normal:

And inside:

Both movies in the one place, even although they are physically stored on two different drives.

The ‘Transcoding Settings’ tab is where we get into the real meat of things, and it’s crucial to set things up correctly here.

First of all, under common transcode settings:

Leave the transcode buffer size at 400 (it’s in relation to your ram). Only change this to a lower amount if you have a low amount of ram, say 1GB, or even 512mb.

Number of cores relates to your CPU, PS3MS should automatically detect this, but in case it doesn’t manually enter how many cores you are running on.

Chapters support will add a feature under the #Transcode# folder that allows you to see virtual chapters created for the interval minute setting you supply.

Number of audio channels relates to the sound setup hooked up to your PS3, self explanatory. Leave the bitrate at 640.

Keep DTS audio in stream is a selling point of PS3 MS. If you have a 5.1 sound system and have encoded a movie with the DTS soundtrack intact, check this box to play DTS through your PS3. Your PS3 must have the volume normalized though, and tracks set to 1+2. If not you’ll just hear static…

These settings can be accessed from pressing ‘Triangle’ during video playback.

Also do note, under video info, ‘Select’ during playback, the audio will report itself as PCM 2.0, 1.5Mpbs

This is just part of the trick to getting DTS working through streamed media, ignore it and instead pay attention to your receiver, you will notice your ‘DTS’ light is lit up and you are hearing audio through all 5 speakers.

Next setting to pay attention to is ‘Remux when audio track is AC3′. This should be ticked if you have a 5.1 sound system as any movies/tv shows you have that include a 5.1 AC3 soundtrack will have the audio passed through untouched. If you don’t have a 5.1 sound system don’t check this, unless your AC3 is 2.0, as you’ll need to let PS3 MS downmix any 5.1 audio tracks to 2.0 for your TV.

Under video quality settings we look at the bandwidth for transcoding. By default these settings are fine if you’re using a wired network. If you’re on wireless, select one of the lower settings from the drop down menu.

Next under video files engines, mencoder:

Turn on ‘Enhanced multicore support for H264 HD content’ if you have a processor with two or more cores.

Turn on ‘Switch to tsMuxer when H264 video is PS3 compatible and there’s no configured subs’. This will enable HD content to be remuxed if it doesn’t need transcoded, it’s crucial to turn this on.

The rest of the settings can be left on default for now.

There is a readme and FAQ/Help section within PS3MS with lots of more useful info, this guide is a quick run through the main features. There are other advanced capabilities such as plugins, two exist right now, an IMDB plugin, and a LastFM plugin.

They are pretty self explanatory to use but I shall include some more detail in the guide later.

If everything is setup correctly you should now be enjoying your movies.

Note:  I’d like to state that there is no copyright breach, since it was much useful (specially for PS3 lovers), I’ve asked Audioboxer if I can share this here so it can reach more and more people.

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