| 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: |
H264info, MeGUI, mkv2vob, Nero Digital Audio Decoder/Encoder, tsMuxeR, TVersity |
| Page Viewed: |
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Step 7.3: M2TS (M2T) container with AC3 audio
As mentioned previously, this method allows you to use a M2TS container to hold your H.264 file, and allows for AC3 5.1 audio (no DTS support). If you chose one of the other methods, you don't need to look at this section/page.
In the "Video Encoding" section of MeGUI, change the File Format to "RAWAVC". This will allow us to create a .264 video stream.
We will now use MeGUI's build in bitrate calculator to calculate the average bitrate of our encoding, to ensure it's not too high for the PS3. From the "Tools" menu, select "Bitrate Calculator".
Under the "File size" section, use the drop down selector to select a pre-defined size or enter your own (this is the size that includes both the video and audio, so the total file size). This will change the "Average Bitrate" display shown just below. Alternatively, you can choose to change the average (video) bitrate, and then the resultant file size will be shown for the bitrate (again, including the audio file size). 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. When you're finished selecting a bitrate/file size, click on the "Apply" button to apply the bitrate setting to the video encoding profile.
Back to the main MeGUI section, press the "Enqueue" button under the "Video Encoding" section. This will add a video encoding job to the job queue (actually two jobs, one for each encoding pass). Do the same for the "Audio" (ie. press the "Enqueue" button as well) to add an audio encoding job to the queue.
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, you should have a .264 video stream file and an .ac3 audio stream file.
Download and extract the contents of the H264info ZIP archive to a directory on your hard disk (there is no installer, just a single executable file). What we need to do now is to run H264info on the .264 file we have just created, to fix a few things which might cause playback problems on the PS3. Start H264info.
Press the "..." button next to the "Input File" box to load in your .264 (or .h264) file. Press the "..." button next to the "Output File" box to specify an output filename ... this should be a different file to the input file, otherwise you simply overwrite your input file with a near blank file. The only option you need to fill out in the boxes below is the "Level" setting. Type "4.1" in this box. Press the "Start" button to start processing. The processing might take a while.
You should now get a new .264 file that has been processed by H264info. We will now use tsMuxeR to mux our .264 and .ac3 files into a M2TS stream. Download and extract the tsMuxeR ZIP file to a folder on your hard-drive, and run the "tsMuxerGUI" executable file to start tsMuxeR. In the "Input files" section, first use the "add" button to load in your H264info processed .264 file, and then to load in the .ac3 file (in this order). In the "Output" section below, select "M2TS muxing" and use the "Browse" button to select an output filename/location. Press the "Start muxing" button at the bottom to beging the muxing process.
After tsMuxeR finishes process (it should say "Done!" in the text log area), we should now have a .m2ts file. You can delete all the other files, other than this .m2ts file. The next step will show you how to use TVersity to stream this .m2ts file to your PS3 ... in order for TVersity to function, the .m2ts file must be renamed to have a .m2t extension (basically get rid of the last 's' in the extension). For playback from a USB/CD/DVD, the renaming is not necessary.
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