At the beginning of the month I discussed the Mac OSX application HandBrake. I wanted to use this application to rip DVD’s to watch on my PS3. I have a NAS on which I wanted to store some of my DVD images. I ran into some problems, the main one being that HandBrake produced an MP4 file that the PS3 couldn’t read.

But recently a new version of HandBrake was released – 0.8.5 beta 1 – which promised to fix that. It has a preset for PS3 video, which is great, though it took me a while to find. (There’s a button near the top that says “presets” which when pressed will open a drawer. That wasn’t very obvious.)

These are my experiences.

Encoding

I wanted to create a high-quality MP4 of a DVD, so in HandBrake I chose to set the file size to 3.5GB – large but it would still fit on a MemoryStick if required. I also set it to use 2-pass encoding. Well, after a couple hours of chugging along on my MacBook, HandBrake unexpectantly quit. Nice.

So last night I just decided to use the PS3 defaults and encode the video that way. That worked fine. It create an MP4 file just over 2GB in size.

Transfer to PS3

I wanted to store my video on my NAS (a ReadyNAS NV+) and access it from a webpage on my PS3. But for some reason, my PS3 can see the file structure on my NAS, but it can’t actually read any files. Which is annoying.

So I used mcloki’s instructions to set up a web server on my Mac. My PS3 saw the directory structure just fine. I put a JPG in there to test, and the PS3 could view it just fine. Great! I plunked the video into my Mac sharing folder, and the PS3 saw that it was there (after a quick refresh). I clicked on it and my PS3 prompted me to save. So far so good. So I saved the file on my PS3’s HDD, but the PS3 downloaded it as size 0! It showed up in my PS3’s video folder as a size 0 file that the PS3 does not recognize. Bummer.

So I re-encoded just one chapter of the DVD to see if maybe it was a file size issue, and that was it. The PS3 downloaded the 200MB MP4 just fine. And the cool thing is that background downloading works for downloading using the web browser!

Playing MP4 on PS3

So I played back the smaller video, and that worked fine. Well, mostly. I didn’t get 5.1 surround sound – just ProLogic-encoded stereo. So I went back to HandBrake and looked at the audio encoding options. It was a little confusing. I think what it said was that you could select both the source audio and the destination audio. The destination was set to Dolby ProLogic II. So I changed that to “6 discrete channels” or something like that, and re-encoded a bit of the movie.

On the PS3 side, however, it still showed up as two-channel audio. Anybody know how to fix this?

Remaining Questions

So that leaves me with three problems to fix. If anybody could help me with any of them, I’d really appreciate it:

1. How do I transfer files from my NAS? Why can I download files from my Mac’s webserver, but not from my NAS’s webserver? If I remember correctly, I see a little lock symbol in the address bar when accessing the NAS. Is that relevant?
2. How do I transfer files to my PS3 over a webpage that are really big? Like 2GB?
3. How do I get 5.1 surround sound encoded in my MP4’s?

Ideas anyone?