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Page 9 of 10: Method 3: M2TS (M2T) container with AC3 audio

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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.

MeGUI: RAWAVC Video Output


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".

MeGUI: 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.

MeGUI: Job 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.

MeGUI: Create 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.

MeGUI: Send to Worker


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.

MeGUI: Worker Summary


When it's all finished, you should have a .264 video stream file and an .ac3 audio stream file.

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 .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.

tsMuxeR


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. For playback from a USB/CD/DVD, the renaming is not necessary.

 

 

 


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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?
Posted by: monzaa, 01:18:26, Dec 14, 2007


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!
Posted by: skro, 09:29:44, Jan 2, 2008


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
Posted by: DVDGuy, 16:03:37, Jan 2, 2008


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.
Posted by: Breakthrough, 09:07:24, Feb 1, 2008


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
Posted by: DVDGuy, 12:47:27, Feb 1, 2008


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! :)
Posted by: Breakthrough, 03:02:01, Feb 2, 2008


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
Posted by: DVDGuy, 11:11:11, Feb 2, 2008


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.
Posted by: HardcoreHoolie, 02:32:04, Feb 8, 2008


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
Posted by: martincho3, 07:41:53, Jun 23, 2008


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).
Posted by: DVDGuy, 10:37:54, Jun 23, 2008


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 ?
Posted by: martincho3, 00:50:04, Jun 24, 2008


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.
Posted by: DVDGuy, 02:12:11, Jun 24, 2008


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.
Posted by: martincho3, 18:32:42, Jun 25, 2008


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!
Posted by: tosvus, 08:09:56, Jul 25, 2008


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.
Posted by: DVDGuy, 14:15:10, Jul 25, 2008


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.
Posted by: Oderik, 00:23:41, Feb 20, 2009



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