How To Play MKV Files On Playstation 3

Ok, so I'm constantly seeing forum posts all over the place where people are asking if they can play MKV files on their PS3 to be answered by "No". While this is not wrong, it's also not true, you can play MKV files on your PS3 and I will show you a couple of ways to do this in the following guides.

METHOD 1 

(The Fun Hacker Way!)

What you will need:
- An MKV file
- MKV2VOB
- A PS3 (duh!)
What MKV2VOB does is remux an MKV file with x264 video and AC3 audio into a VOB file which is playable on your Playstation 3. Before you ask...no, this will not result in the loss of quality because the audio or video are not touched. The streams are split and mixed into the VOB file.
So you've got your MKV file now and you are ready to start remixing it:
- First, you have to open MKV2VOB and select the file which you would like to work on and then select where you would like to save the finished file. When you have done this, click "Save".

- You will then have a dialog box pop up that asks if you want to enable automatic MPEG2 transcoding. It is recommended that you click "Yes".
- Another box will then pop up when you start the whole process. Do not close this box. Wait for it to complete what it is doing.

- When that box has closed, another box will open. Again, do not close or mess with this box. Wait for it to complete what it is doing.

- When that box has finished doing what it is doing, yet another box will open. Leave this alone and do not close it.

- When that box has closed the task is complete and you should be presented with a "Remuxing Complete" box.

You're probably thinking "Oh no, but my Playstation 3 can't store/play files with a size this large".. 

well, for some reason if you try it you find that..it CAN!!! YAY!!!


I hope this guide is somewhat helpful for those who are not sure about how to play MKV files on their PS3.
If you are having any troubles or have any questions...give me a comment. Now on to the next Method I found And the Easier of the 2

METHOD 2

(The Easy User Friendly Way!)

PS3 Media Server

Hi there... you will find on this page an experimental upnp media server I've written in Java (so you can also use it on Linux), with precious help from MPlayer/MEncoder, FFMpeg, AVISynth eventually, and currently using with my Playstation3.... I was quite fed up with TVersity and others servers I've tried as none of them easily supports subtitles and 1080p transcode, as well as any kind of files I want to play without worrying about ps3 compatibility.

I'm currently transcoding in real-time and no quality loss, 1080p mkv files. The drawback is the high bitrate your network must support: with the default settings, specific scenes with a lot of details (e.g.: zoom on a newspaper article) can have bitrates near 100mb/s, so gigabit is maybe useful.
The fact is, in order to see HD videos it's better to have an ethernet wired PS3 !

Download


PMS 0.96 for Windows
PMS 0.96 for Linux
 

Current features

Ready to launch and play. No codec packs to install. No folder configuration and pre-parsing or this kind of annoying thing. All your folders are directly browsed by the PS3. There's an automatic refresh also.

Real-time video transcoding via MEncoder or Avisynth.

OGG/FLAC/MPC Audio transcoding

Thumbnail generation for Videos

You can choose your audio/subtitle language on the PS3!

All formats PS3 natively supports: MP3/WMA, JPG/PNG/GIF/TIFF, and all kind of videos (AVI, MP4, TS, M2TS, MPEG) the ps3 is willing to play

ZIP/RAR files as browsable folders

Preliminary support for pictures based feeds, such as Flickr and Picasaweb

Preliminary Internet TV / Web Radio support with VLC or MPlayer

Requirements

A fairly recent cpu (mine is a C2D E6750, 2.66GHz) for smooth 1080p transcoding, but 720p seems to be easily transcodable with a simple P4 :p

750Mb of RAM (for transcoding)

Installation

Get a Java Runtime Environment (Java6 minimum)

Launch PMS.exe (PMS.sh on Linux)

If the server is not detected by the PS3 (this can happens if you have several network interfaces), try setting yourself the correct IP address in the network configuration tab

Transcoding on Windows
2 possible methods:

A) Using the server "as is": No codecs pack to install, it will use Mencoder for the transcoding part.

B) Using Avisynth/FFDshow. Paired with CoreAVC, it's quite efficient with multi cores.

1- If not already done, get and install a codec pack with ffdshow. My favorite is CCCP Codec Pack

2- Get and install AVISynth 2.5.7 (I've met some framerate problems with 2.5.8 betas)

3- Set up the FFDShow Audio Mixer to 5.1 (3/0/2 LFE)

4- Set "Autoload VS Filter" to true

5- Configure Haali Splitter for audio/subtitles language priorities

Optional Codecs: CoreAVC is quite cheap and a good choice for H264 decoding (as FFDshow's libavcodec isn't yet fully optimized with multicores), Quicktime Alternative and Real Alternative are also useful (Apple 1080p trailers for example).

Transcoding on Linux
You just need to have mplayer, mencoder and ffmpeg binaries on your path (the more recent, the better).

Usage
By default, wmv, avi, mpeg files are streamable, except in case of srt/sub file present with the same file name. All videos can be transcoded, as each streamable video appears once into its folder, and once into a special folder "#Transcoded#" present in each sub folder, with different options (audio/subtitles/other transcoding tools maybe) so you can choose what's working best on ps3. However, only ogg, flac, and mpc audio files can be transcoded (I assume all mp3, wma and wav files can be played 'as is' by the ps3)

History:

v0.96:
- Interactive way of choosing your audio language, subtitles and transcoder mode (see #Transcoded# Folder)
- Interactive settings (see #Settings# Folder)
- Better subtitles looking
- Folders browsing optimization
- Several network errors fixes with 2.52 firmware
- A lot of small things

v0.95: MEncoder now included as it's used for the transcoding part (Avisynth or not), Fixes with the 2.50 firmware, Better transcoding performance (but greater bitrates !), Lighter configuration file

v0.94: Fixes: 2.50 Firmware problem, better pipes and sub processes management

v0.93: Fixed bug in the server IP adress binding

v0.92: Linux compatible version / Bugs fixes / No more A/V temp files created (full use of pipes)

v0.91: Better memory handling / automatic detection of VLC and AviSynth

v0.90: First release, some bugs, experimental stuff done for myself (at first!)

Known issues:

Seek to specific time is OK, but fast forward/fast rewind can be difficult to use, especially with Avisynth transcoding (depends of the machine)

Ass subtitles are not yet fully implemented in MEncoder (embedded fonts not working). Try Avisynth/Vobsub if the font design does matters :)

XML character encoding issues (asian characters, etc.)

Planned features ?

Several encoding profiles: wired, low network bandwidth, etc.

Linear PCM output: Not possible for now as I have yet to found a good lpcm muxer, compatible with the ps3 (or make mine)

GUI configuration

Better audio files tags handling

Via
http://ps3mediaserver.blogspot.com/2008/10/test.html