Regular Rep: 2 Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 1,190 | First you should research what your PS3 can play.
A google search suggests firmware update 2.1 adds DivX and VC-1 support. There’s a couple of caveats. DivX 3.11 isn’t supported (fourcc DIV3 and DIV4), and Xvid isn’t supported either (fourcc XVID).
Another google search gave me this
http://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps3/current/video/filetypes.html
which is really worth reading.
The highlights: only certain combos of containers/codecs are allowed.
For example, H.264 is only supported in the MP4 container (files with extension .mp4). DivX (except DivX 3) and Motion JPEG are supported in the AVI container (which is really the only place where they’re found usually anyway). And VC-1 is only supported in WMV (so for example you couldn’t encode an AVI using WMV3, even though that would be considered VC-1).
You probably want to check whether your PlayStation has the proper firmware that supports those formats first.
You asked for a codec that doesn’t have much degradation in quality. Fortunately, pretty much all the codecs supported by the PS3 are very modern, and offer good compression, and little quality loss, so it’s really up to you.
This leaves you with A LOT of options. Perhaps, if you already own some commercial video encoding program (maybe one that came with your miniDV recorder), that can help you make a choice.
Since the PS3 can play MPEG-2 (the format of DVD’s) and MPEG-1 (VCD’s), just grabbing the VOB files on the DVD [I assume it’s unencrypted, unlike movie DVD’s, since you said it’s a family video, so you don’t need to rip] and the DAT files on the VCD’s should be sufficient.
Of course, the VOB files will be somewhat large, but there won’t be any loss in quality since they’re copied as-is. If they’re too big, you can always re-encode them using DivX, VC-1, or H.264.
You said the AVI files you have come from the miniDV. I presume (though I can’t be sure) that they’re in some DV format (my guess is DVSD - but you should check with a program like gspot). If I’m wrong, and you’re super-lucky, and it’s in MJPG (Motion JPEG - the format used by many, many digital cameras), all you have to do is just copy the AVI. If not, you’ll have to encode it to one of the supported formats listed in the second link above.
MP4/H.264: I normally use QuickTime Pro. I know the encoder is lousy, but it’s easy as cake to use. There’s a lot of H.264 encoders out there, and also many programs to make MP4 files. The freeware stuff is probably harder to use than the commercial programs, but that’s just the way it is. Just be sure that you get the right container and right codec (for example don’t produce an MP4 file in MPEG-4 part 2 (fourcc MP4V) (wrong codec), or an H.264 video in mkv (wrong container)). Doom9’s FAQ has a list of mp4 encoders here
MPEG-1: simple and ubiquitous. Use TMPGEnc free edition
AVI/DivX: Get the DivX codec from http://www.divx.com, and VirtualDub from http://www.virtualdub.org. Then right click and save this guide and follow the instructions (very easy). There’s more guides here if you want to do more advanced stuff.
WMV/VC-1: I just want to say I don’t like this option, because Microsoft’s container is proprietary (meaning if you ever need to convert it to something else, you can only use Microsoft tools to do so, or tools by people who paid Microsoft royalties). At least if they’d allowed VC-1 in AVI like the WMV3 VCM package, but nooo... Anyway if you want to use this, get Windows Media Encoder 9 from here. Remember to use Windows Media Video 9 for your video codec! (I know it’s not listed as “VC-1”, but it’s part of the standard.) You could use Windows Movie Maker if you’re really lazy, but note that you won’t have any control over encoding parameters, and the default settings tend to be of lousy quality.
A couple of things to keep in mind:
If in TMPGEnc you’re having trouble playing the DVSD AVI’s (aka you can’t see the video), go to Option, Environmental Settings, VFAPI plug-in, and right click on the DirectShow filter and increase its priority until it’s top (this is because Microsoft’s DVSD decoder is DirectShow-only).
If you don’t already have a DVD or MPEG-2 decoder, Windows Media Encoder and/or TMPGEnc may not be able to read your VOB files. If that’s the case, get one from here
Finally you have the VHS tapes to deal with. For those, you need to first capture the video to your computer (basically, digitize the movies). There’s a lot of ways to do it. The classic way of doing it was to buy a capture card and open your PC and plug it into one of the PCI slots. Then you plug your VCR into the back of the capture card, and run the video capture software bundled with the card to convert the VHS to a video file on your PC. Of course there’s a LOT of different options with that: depending on the brand/manufacturer and model of the card, you can have choices as to what format to record to (MPEG, AVI, DV, other...) - it can range from amateur quality to professional broadcast quality equipment in the thousands of dollars. Nowadays people use USB-based capture “dongles”. One example is the Dazzle. You can also have a lot of choices there.
The first hit when I typed “video capture card” on google gave me tiger direct, and you can see both types of capture devices
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_tlc.asp?CatId=1423
Once you digitize the VHS to your computer, you can then convert it to one of the formats supported by the PS3 (or if you’re lucky and the program you used let you, you may convert it directly to a supported format).
As you can see, you have a lot a choices, hence the long post, and the delay in getting your answer!!!
Last edited 10 May 2008 03:09 pm by anonymous |
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