Barbed Wire Bytecode Bacon Burger

Quite a lot of acronyms there don’t ya think?

Anyway… The PS3 is fantastic. I think most people with half a brain will agree on that. It does however have it’s shortcomings and one of them is that it doesn’t play mkv-files. So whenever I stumble upon something in that format I have to perform some sort of black magic on it in order to turn it into an mp4 that the PS3 agrees with.

The easy way to go is to just flush it through HandBrake. That works but then it will be decoded and re-encoded which potentially causes quality degradation and takes foreeeeeever. So that’s not really an option I’m happy with.

However, decoding and re-encoding is actually unnecessary since what’s wrong is the container and not the contents. Luckily unpacking and repackaging the mkv as mp4 can all be done with a bunch of free and open source tools. It’s still a bit of a hassle though so today I spent a couple of hours putting together a script that makes it semi-automatic and a lot easier.

One thing that proved to be a bit more work than I expected was turning DTS 5.1 audio into AAC 5.1. What I came up with should work, but I haven’t been able to verify it since my receiver doesn’t support AAC 5.1. If yours does, please let me know if it works or not. For this reason in my personal version of the script I turn DTS 5.1 into AAC stereo instead (using the last part of the if-elif-else statement), which is OK even if it’s not quite as nice as 5.1 sound would have been.

All of the tools I used are open source software and available for most Linux-flavors (I use Fedora 12), except Nero AAC Encoder which is just free as in beer.

So that nobody else has to suffer through the process of putting a script like this together; here’s the script. It’s fairly self-explanatory and I even commented the code a bit so it shouldn’t be that hard to understand what it does and why. Enjoy!

Download the script here!

While putting together the script I found this article very useful for deciphering the mess that is audio codecs. I would also like to give a shout-out to one of my co-workers who introduced me to several of the tools and how they work.

UPDATE:
In further experimenting I found that my original script contained a couple of bugs. I believe I’ve sorted those out now and I’ve updated the code above. I’m still not claiming this script to be bug-free so if you find anything that’s not working, please let me know.

I’ve been playing around with streaming media (primarily video) from my iMac to my PS3. I’ve tried a couple of different streaming solutions, amongst them MediaLink and MediaTomb, and have finally landed on the (most of the time) excellent PS3 Media Server. It’s free (as in beer), open source (GPL v2), available on Mac, Linux and Windows and it works (most of the time).

PS3 Media Server works better than everything else I’ve tried and does transcoding so that I can play .mkv and other formats that the PS3 otherwise doesn’t support. No real setup, it worked right out of the box so to speak. Install and run, that’s it. Naturally it is very tweakable and you can probably spend hours and hours fidgetting about with all the different settings.

However, just like everything else I’ve tried there are bugs, some more annoying than others, and this got me thinking. Why hasn’t Sony themselves released a media streaming solution for the PS3? I mean, Microsoft have Windows Media Player working together with the Xbox 360 and iTunes has a similar relationship with AppleTV. So I’m thinking, wouldn’t the company that actually designed the PS3 be best suited to author media streaming software for the console? Makes sense right?

I don’t know why Sony hasn’t released a media server application of their own and I don’t know if they ever will. But if they don’t they should at least make an effort to help out the developers working on these applications, publish detailed specifications, and so on. Maybe then we can have transcoding media streaming for the PS3 that works close to 100% of the time.

Until then though, PS3 Media Server will keep doing a really good job pushing my media to my home entertainment system, 1080p, 5.1 surround sound and all. And I’ll keep swearing at weird network errors, freezing video and crackling sound on the fairly few occasions those things happen.

In game XMB! Finally! And playing music from the harddrive while gaming - awesome! Now just release the damn thing already

Two of my favorite things, the UFC and the PS3, united at last. This is going to be awesome. I’m sure of it.

I just had my ass handed to me by what I’m guessing is a 14-year old kid.

During five grueling minutes I was utterly humiliated in an online game of “Mario Strikers Charged Football” on the Wii. I was run over, dazzled and crushed by this kid with the kind of lightning fast reflexes and tremendous skills that only someone that has yet to finish puberty and has too much free time on their hands can ever possess.

I’m not a bad gamer in any way. I’ve played endless hours of various games, both online and offline, on my own and against others, with great success. But being over thirty with a job and every day life going on, I don’t have six hours every day to devote to every new game that hits the market. I’d like to, but I don’t and I never will. This is why from here on as soon as a new game comes out and I decide to play it against others online I’ll surely find myself being destroyed by teenagers again and again.

I’m pretty much at peace with this fact though. I just wish that there was some secluded area online where us old timers could graze and play amongst ourselves without having to deal with the angst of combatting hyperactive teeny gamers. Maybe there is such a place, and I just don’t know about it. If so, someone please enlighten me.

Too me, it’s no longer as much about winning as it used to. It’s more about experiencing the games and enjoying them for what they are - exquisite works of digital art. If I get my ass handed to me by another gamer, I don’t mind as long as it was a fair fight and I enjoyed myself.

Speaking of which, I just bought “Warhawk” for the PS3 and I look forward to getting my ass kicked time and time again.

And they did…

Yes, you guessed it. I finished “Resistance: Fall of Man”. Awesome game. I’m so coming back for more very soon!

I finished “Ratchet & Clank: Tools of destruction” this past Friday, and I’m almost sad I did so. That game has been so much fun to play it’s unbelievable, and it’s sooo beautiful. Definitely HD-gaming at it’s prettiest.

Finishing the game unlocks a “challenge mode” which is basically the game all over again but you get to keep all of the weapons and gadgets you’ve collected while playing it through the first time, plus there’s now a bunch of new weapons and a lot more monsters. So, it looks like I’m far from done with this game after all. Fun, fun, fun!

As if that wasn’t enough, two hours ago I finally finished “God of war” unlocking plenty of nice extras, such as “Challenge of the gods” and “God mode”.

There’s still more to unlock though, but in order to do that I need to finish the game in “God mode”, and that’ll certainly take me a while. So maybe I’m not so much done with that one either when I think about it.

One feature that I’ve found very nice on the PS3 is that I can download playable demos of games from the PlayStation Store. When games cost as much as they do these days it’s really a great thing to be able to take them for a little test drive before forking over my hard-earned cash for the real deal.

Yesterday I downloaded the demo for “Conan”, and oh boy am I ever glad I did. You see, if I’d paid actual money for this piece of crap I’d be livid!

First of all: the graphics. Hello? Isn’t this supposed to be an HD-capable console? I’ve got PS2 games several years old that look way better - “God of war” and “Killzone” to name a few.

Secondly and probably most importantly: the gameplay. You have basically no friggin’ moves and the game seems to respond very slowly so combat is both frustrating and a bore. The minute elements of puzzle-solving that was featured in the demo was also laughable.

Thirdly, the demo is way too short for an action-adventure game. I mean really, I played through it completely in minutes and afterwards I wasn’t one bit interested in seeing more since the demo left me thinking that this was what the game was like, only longer.

So thanks Sony for helping me steer clear of this turd of a game.

Demos I have been enjoying though and that made me wanting to play the game for real are “The Club” and “Uncharted: Drake’s fortune”. Now those left me salivating slightly and definitely wanting more!

The free download of “Lemmings” (full game!) also put a big smile on my face. What an awesome game in all of it’s simplicity and how missed it ever since I played it ages ago on the original GameBoy.

I’ve also download “Kane & Lynch” and “Stranglehold”, but I haven’t gotten around to trying them out yet.

The following is taken from the latest newsletter from J!NX and makes me even happier that I went for a PS3 and not an Xbox360:

As a public service, we’d like to provide this brief rant: Nine people in the J!NX Office ponied up a hefty wad of female deer for an Xbox360. Of those nine, six of us now have a broken Xbox360. For the math-impaired, that makes 66.666% (repeating, of course) bitter J!NX gamers. So sad… We have consoles from 20 years ago that still work perfectly, apart from a few cartridges that need a blow now and then… (heh, blow…)

The Xbox360 has the largest amount of awesome games of any of the next-gen consoles, but this whole thing with them breaking is just embarrassing. There’s no other console in history that has as bad of a track record from breaking as the 360.

And now when I think about it, I’ve never even heard of a PS3 breaking without someone doing something pretty stupid to it.