Encoding Videos for your PS3 with Avidemux

Sometimes, the interscnitzel is helpful -- sometimes, it leaves you without hair while you try every conceivable setting to make things work.

My better half wanted to watch some IPTV we'd downloaded on the big TV (Standard Def), which is hooked up to my Playstation 3. IPTV comes down as .AVI in SDTV and .MKV for HDTV stuff, but the PS3 decided all of that was 'Unsupported Data'

Checking the list of supported video files (please Sony, add .MKV to your list), we found that AVI files should be supported.

For those interested, there's a more detailed examination of what AVI files (DivX or XviD) the PS3 will play, over here.

After some searching, we fired up Avidemux (2.4.2, Linux -- but the Windows one would work too, if you didn't have anything else available) and played with Settings -- the best set the we came up with was:

Video: MPEG-4 ASP (lavc)
Audio: MP2 (lavc)
Format: AVI



To make the whole process a little easier, I also went into Edit/Preferences/Automation and switched on Automatically build VBR map, Automatically rebuild index and Automatically remove packed bitstream (as all the AVI files come as "AVI, pack VOP", which needs to be unpacked first before you can change the output format type).



Now, save your file -- put it on a USB stick or DVD and watch TV on your PS3 :)

note: if you're using DVD-RW's to watch movies from (my personal preference), the Sony DVD-RW (Gold, in Green cases) work flawlessly and seem much more reliable than the TDK or Imation ones (My 40GB PS3 has yet to successfully read an Imation DVD, for example).

important note about USB sticks: After some headscratching over why videos don't play from USB sticks, I discovered the USB device should be FAT32 formatted (default on SANDISK drives, if you've got access to a Linux box, mkfs.vfat will do the job. Then, on the device, you need to create a directory called "VIDEO" (all caps, without the quotes) and put your videos in that directory, then the PS3 will see them properly.