Articles - > PS3 H.264 Conversion Guide

Title:	PS3 H.264 Conversion Guide
Description:	This guide shows you how to convert DVD/AVI/DivX/XviD/MOV files to a PS3 compatible H.264 file that can uses AAC or AC3 5.1 audio, covering 3 methods for making MP4, VOB or a M2TS stream
Author/Publisher:	DVDGuy
Ease of use:	Intermediate
Software Used:	MeGUI, mkv2vob, Nero Digital Audio Decoder/Encoder, tsMuxeR, TVersity
Page Viewed:	476942 times

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Page 8 of 10: Method 2: VOB container with AC3/DTS audio

Step 7.2: VOB container with AC3/DTS audio

As mentioned previously, this method allows you to use a VOB container to hold your H.264 file, and allows for AC3 or DTS 5.1 audio. If you chose one of the other methods, you don't need to look at this section/page.

Press the "AutoEncode" button or from the "Tools" drop down menu, select "AutoEncode" to launch the Automatic Encoder setup windows.

This is pretty straight forward - just specify the output size of your video file either as a file size, or as an average bitrate. Then, make sure the Container is set correctly, to "MKV". For AVI/DivX/XviD conversion, you can get the same quality video at roughly 80% of the original AVI/DivX/XviD file's filesize. For 720p/1080p QuickTime HD (MOV) files, these are already using H.264 so you should try and match the file size whenever possible (again, make sure the "Average Bitrate" is under control). For maximum compatibility with the PS3, the bitrate peaks should not exceed 15 Mbps (15,000 kbit/s, although I've observed brief peaks of more than 25 Mbps that seems to not cause problems, and that the Xbox 360 handled peaks better than the PS3), otherwise you could see skipped playback. There is currently no way to control the bitrate peaks for the encoded file, and so as a general rule, try to keep the average bitrate of the video under 9000 kbit/s. The output location can be changed as well - this file will be the final output file that you want, so make sure you remember where you put it and don't accidentally delete it when cleaning up (I like to put this file in a different folder to all the other files, just in case).

When you're ready, press the "Queue" button and all the necessary jobs will be added to the encoding queue.

Click on the "Queue" tab and all the jobs should be listed there. Below is an example job queue where a trailer is being encoded, an explanation of the queued jobs shown in the screenshot below:

job4: Encoding audio track for clip
job5: Encoding video, 1st pass for clip
job6: Encoding video, 2nd pass for clip
job7: Muxing audio and video to MKV for clip

New in MeGUI 0.2.6 or above is the idea of "workers". This has been introduced to take advantage of multi-core processors, allowing parallel job execution (processing more than one job at a time). Of course, certain jobs are dependent on another previous job being completed before it can begin (for example, job2-4 above requires job2-3 to be finished, and job2-5 requires all previous jobs to be finished), and so parallel execution is not always possible. But if you are encoding multiple video clips at the same time, then parallel execution allows each core of your CPU to be fully utilized at all times, allowing up to 4 video encodings at the same time on a quad core processor, for example. In essense, each "worker" represents a CPU thread that can be run on an individual core - so if you have a dual core processor, then you might want to create two workers, quad-core => 4 workers, etc. Even if you have only a single core CPU, you will still need to create at least one worker before MeGUI can start encoding video. To create a worker, from the "Worker" menu, select the "Create New Worker" option and then enter a name for this new worker.

Create as many workers as you need (again, 2 for dual-core, 4 for quad-core ...). You can right click on each job to specify which worker it will use, or you can leave it unset and MeGUI will automatically assign workers (recommended). You only need to do this the first time you use MeGUI, as worker settings are remembered.

When you are ready to start encoding, press the "Start" to start the encoding. You can view the status of your workers by selecting the "Workers Summary" option from the "Workers" menu.

When it's all finished (and this one could take a while, an hour or more for even a short clip, depending on your CPU), your MKV file should be ready. You can delete all the other files, unless you plan on making more encodings from them. We will now use a trick to convert the MKV file to a VOB file.

Even though technically the VOB file requires MPEG-2 video, the way the PS3 software works, a VOB file with H.264 video and AC3/DTS 5.1 audio will work just fine, and provide you with 5.1 channel audio without the need for an AAC decoder or HDMI PCM 5.1 output. In this step, we will use the mkv2vob package to convert the MKV file to a VOB file (no re-encoding is needed, so the process should only takes a matter of minutes, not hours).

Now that you have the MKV file, download and extract the contents of the mkv2vob package to a directory on your computer. Run the mkv2vob executable and it will ask you to load in your MKV file. Do so.

mkv2vob will then ask you where you want to save the VOB file (default location is the same as the input MKV file). Specify a location/filename and then press "Save" to continue.

mkv2vob will now spawn a command line window and start working. It will also open the H264info program to do further processing. When the entire process is finished, the following prompt will show and your VOB file is ready to use.

You can now proceed to Step 8, which is to get the PS3 to see your VOB file through TVersity.

I have made a test clip from the instructions in this guide, that you can download. Download the I Am Legend 1080p AC3 5.1 VOB Trailer.

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Article Navigation:

Page 1: Introduction + Installation
Page 2: DVD/MPEG-2 Conversion
Page 3: MeGUI: AviSynth Script Creator
Page 4: MeGUI: Video Encoding Options
Page 5: MeGUI: Audio Encoding Options
Page 6: MeGUI: Cutting, Bitrate Calculator and AutoEncode
Page 7: Method 1: MP4 container with AAC audio
Page 8: Method 2: VOB container with AC3/DTS audio <--
Page 9: Method 3: M2TS (M2T) container with AC3 audio
Page 10: TVersity: Playing the H.264 file on your PS3

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User Comments:

i seem to be having trouble with the v2.6 if MeGUI. anyone else having probs?

This guide worked like a charm when encoding to AAC, however, when selecting the mkv container and AC3, i keep getting a fatal error in MeGUI. "Input and Output files may not be same Source of exception...". Has anyone else seen this. I've tried from the scratch twice now, and always get this error when I push "autoencode". Thanks!

skro: In AutoEncode, try to set the output file name to be different to any of the input files - try a different directory to save the file if you can

I believe that this guide may need updating, or you need to make seperate guides for AAC and AC3 audio streams. The reason? http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=ps3media&thread.id=96630 I found a way to get seeking to work, but only with AC3 files. And no, this IS NOT the one-step MKV -> VOB way.

Thanks Breakthrough, for the heads up. I'm in the process of updating the guide already, and the new version should be available in a few day's time

Thanks DVDGuy. Again, the only problem with my method is the lack of any other audio stream (DTS/AAC don't work, but I'm still testing PCM). Also, I haven't tested streaming it with TVersity. Now, for my question to you. In my process, I noted that you HAVE to process the video through H264info (regardless if you set the encoder settings properly). I followed this guide exactly, and got a playable stream - however, it doesn't work in a .M2TS container. The reason? I noticed that, when I put the .264 file right from MeGUI (along with the .AC3 stream) into tsMuxeR, and began to mux them, I got a "frame delimiter absent" error. It still processes, but the resultant stream fails to play; only after processing it with H264info does it work. Do you have any clue why this happens, and how to solve it? I don't know much about MeGUI, so maybe it's an option that only relates to the resultant stream? I couldn't find anything in Google, and it'd be nice to eliminate this step (because, more often than not, it's quite time consuming). Thanks! :)

There is an option within x264 for "Access Unit Delimiter" (--aud), which is necessary for storage within MPEG-2 transport streams. Might have to test if enabling this will get rid of the "frame delimiter absent" error

Hi There. I have a problem with the audio decoding. I have several movies with the length of almost 2 hours. After decoding the AC3 soundmix, It will sort of stop by 199.1MB. the projected size will decrease to also 199.1 MB. this will happen by al these movies. When i play the audio file it stopped after the same time as the 199.1MB, When i try to decode a movie with only 43 minutes it does work. does anyone knows with is wrong? tnx for the answer. and thanx for the Tut.

is it normal that after 6 hours im still on job 2. I have 4 jobs: Audio,AVC 1st pass,AVC 2nd pass,mux . Im still on 90% of job2 after at least 6-7 hours.my pc: P4530J 3GHZ 1GB ram GF6600GT, 160 GB SATA HDD

AVC encoding takes a while. For reference, on a P4 3.2 GHz, it takes 30 minutes to encode a 2 minute 720p video (from an 1080p source).

so it's not very pleasant method.If you have to make 30 hour(at least) operation for a 2 hour movie ... ? how would you comment on that ?

The encoding time I quoted was for a P4 3.2 GHz, which is quite outdated now. Modern CPUs should do it a lot faster, but you're still looking at several hours to encode your typical movie. Unfortunately that's the major problem with AVC at the moment, since it's a great quality codec, but it takes a lot of CPU to encode and decode - quality comes at a price. Future CPU/GPUs will support accelerated encoding (I think Nvidia recently demonstrated a transcoding of a 2 hour HD video using their GPU, and it only took only 20 minutes to do the whole thing), and x264 (the encoding engine used by MeGUI) will be updated to include more of these types of acceleration/optimizations in the future.

I made one encoding.I reencoded from 720p mkv file with DTS sound to a 720p(used the resize function and chose 1280x*** suggested resolution) VOB Container with 384Kbps for audio.The file turned out to be 4,62GB although I specified 1DVD on two drop-down menus and I'm not sure but if I remember correct estimated size was not bigger than a DVD can hold.Is this normal and what do I have to change to reduce my filesize to fit a single DVD?Do I have to do all over again because the reencoding took my PC 2 and a half days or is there a fast working splitter to split them in a sec.Thanks in advance.

Awesome guide! on a somewhat related note, does anyone know how to resize/reencode a HDDVD to something playable on ps3 through Tversity? With the format being dead, I'm worried I won't be able to play back my collection once my hddvd addon dies..... I understand it is possible to rip the discs as is, but that will take too much space. I'd like to resize to 720p, and get it in a format the ps3 can read. Any ideas????? Thanks!

tosvus: There's a HD DVD to Blu-ray guide floating around somewhere on the net, which might interest you. I might get around to write a version of this guide too here.

There is no need to fix the h264 stream with H264info anymore. In fact, "fixing" the stream will actually break it (it will still be playable but with glitches). I have a question about b-pyramids: Is it still true, that the PS3 doesn't support it? I just tried a sample with b-pyramids allowed and it works fine. Though I'm not sure if b-pyramids are actually used.