Convert AVI to PS3 Compatable mp4

I recently purchased a PlayStation 3! When I booted it up I noticed the “Find Media Server” option. This got my juices flowing. I always have to connect my laptop to the TV when I want to watch movies from my network share ( I use samba to distribute them to the many computers at my house ). This gets very annoying, especially when using WiFi.

Enter Media Tomb, a UPnP ( Universal Plug and Play ) media server! MT is pretty easy to configure so I won’t go into that here.

So now I have a functional media server, presenting all my media to the PS3! GREAT! EFF! Wait… None of the movies play… SIGH.. I quickly pulled out the PS3 owners manual and checked for compatible video formats. Alas one of my ~70 movies where in the correct format.

Enter mplayer faac ffmpeg bc MP4Box x264 and Jarkko’s nifty script! On Debian, installation of the of the needed apps couldn’t be simpler apt-get install XXXXX and wham you are done and ready to transcode!

Mac OSX, however, is a different story.

First you need to have Mac Ports along with the following ports: wxWidgets libtheora spidermonkey freetype openjpeg faad2 XviD ffmpeg faac x264 . Once you have all the listed applications installed, you can start building GPAC ( this is where you get MP4Box ).

Building GPAC:

First off we need to set some variables so everything knows about the headers and libraries for the ports we have installed.

export CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -I/opt/local/include" export CPPFLAGS="$CFLAGS" export LDFLAGS="-L/local/lib -L/usr/local/lib -L/opt/local/lib" export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:/opt/local/lib/pkgconfig" export ACLOCAL_FLAGS="$ACLOCAL_FLAGS -I /opt/local/share/aclocal"

Now build GPAC with ./configure --prefix=/opt/local && make && make install. As long as you have your $PATH setup correctly everything should be in place for you to convert your movies!