Converting Matroska to M2TS for PS3 and Mediatomb

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:19:24 +0000

It has been a while since I last posted, mainly due to not having Internet access at home for a month. Anyway, I’m online again and I have been tinkering with various projects the most recent of which is Matroska conversion (again).

Matroska to MP4

For sometime I have been converting Martoska files to MPEG-4 with AAC 5.1 audio so I can stream them via Mediatomb to my PlayStation 3. The conversion process works well although there is some overhead in transcoding the audio and the AAC 5.1 audio is not as good quality as the original AC3 or DTS.

If you are interested I’ve put my code in GitHub, the script automates the whole process.

MPV-to-MP4

Matroska to M2TS

A little while back I read it was possible to convert those same Matroska file to M2TS files which, so long as the audio is AC3, so takes much less time to convert. As the PlayStation 3 can’t play DTS audio streams inside a M2TS container there is still a requirement to transcode DTS to AC3. That said the conversion to M2TS requires less file I/O than converting to MPEG-4 and is therefore it is generally a quicker conversion method, typically just 2 or 3 minutes on my workstation at home.

Plus the audio quality of the AC3 or transcoded DTS is better than that of transcoded AAC 5.1. I’ve created my own script to fully automate the conversion process. The script has been tested on Ubuntu 8.10 64-bit but there is an outside chance it will work on Mac OS X if you can get the required tools installed. Again, you can find my script on GitHub.

MPV-to-M2TS

Mediatomb 0.12 - Streaming audio and video around the house

martin@wimpress.com (Martin Wimpress) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 16:23:39 +0000

Mediatomb is an open source (GPL) UPnP MediaServer with a nice web user interface, it allows you to stream your digital media through your home network and listen to/watch it on a variety of UPnP compatible devices, such as the PlayStation in my case.

Mediatomb 0.12 is not yet released as final yet but it is certainly stable enough for general use, so I spent the last week migrating from Mediatomb 0.11 to Mediatomb 0.12.

I’ve recently finished ripping my entire CD collection (344 CDs) to MP3 and I am currently ripping my DVD collection (85 done so far) to MP4 with AAC 5.1 audio. The ‘Music’ and ‘Video’ folders in our home directories are mounted via NFS. The Mediatomb server uses the same data sources so any playlists or new music/videos we might import are immediately reflected in Mediatomb.

Our entire CD library is now available at the click of a button, automatically organised by genre, artist and date. We have also created some playlists in .m3u or .pls format.

New to Mediatomb 0.12 is the ability to scrobble your music to Last.fm, this a killer feature for me and why I chose to migrate to 0.12 before it goes final.

I ripped the CDs using SoundJuicer, since I can configure it to use LAME presets. I then used the Music Brainz Picard Tagger to add additional tagging and embed cover art and then applied ReplayGain.

Finally my wife and I use Banshee to manage the music library on our computers, including the creation of playlists and syncing to our iPods.

I am using Handbrake to rip the DVDs to MP4. I’ve created a new PS3 compatible profile which is focused on quality, I’ll post details about that in the future. Mediatomb 0.12 has some experimental features to stream video content from .ISO images of DVDs. I’ve yet to play with that but it sounds very cool. I’ve also created a script which queries IMDB to categorise our film library by genre and create summary information about each film in the library. I’ll be posting more about that soon. I haven’t finalised how we will integrate Photo management with Mediatomb yet, but that is that final piece in the puzzle.

MP4 on Wimpy's World

Converting Matroska to M2TS for PS3 and Mediatomb

Matroska to MP4

Matroska to M2TS

Mediatomb 0.12 - Streaming audio and video around the house