This past weekend I picked up a Playstation 3. One of the main reasons I got one was the ability to have my movies (in Xvid) in my living room since I recently got rid of my MythTV box.
I’ve been pretty disappointed with the video playback as NONE of my movies are recognized by the PS3, and I’ve got quite a few to choose from.
This problem was actually two-fold. From what I can tell, Windows media player’s library sharing doesn’t play nice with 64-bit Windows XP. That’s what gave me the “No Titles Available” error.
The second problem had to do with the way the movies are encoded. All of them are Xvid w/ vbr audio or ac3 audio and were encoded using DVDFab.
One solution is TVersity. TVersity is a UPnP server that will transcode the files as requested if the player (in this case, the PS3), can’t natively play them. This is all fine and dandy, but it requires a fairly powerful computer serving these files, and on the fly transcoding isn’t what I was looking for, and doesn’t support x64. It looks like its just lagging, but the blame goes to the OS.
I instead tried FUPPES. FUPPES is an open source UPnP media server, and it worked very well for what I wanted.
I still couldn’t view all of my movies, though
I decided that it might be a good idea to just convert my movies into something the PS3 can play. I looked into a few tool which forums and websites claimed to work, with no luck. The tools I tried were SUPER, which can convert the audio of the file to a more supported format, and AVIRecomp, which can repackage the entire file in a more usable format.
Many people have had luck with those two tools, but I wasn’t so lucky.
My last hope was to just convert from XviD to DivX using the official DivX codec. To do this, I used a tool called Dr. Divx with the latest version of DivX, DivX6 at the time of this writing. Dr. DivX converts pretty much anything to DivX, so I just dropped in my video files and let the tool work its magic.
Once if finished, I just used FUPPES, and now I can happily watch all of my movies on my TV.
Hopefully, someone will find this as helpful as I have.