Monday, September 22, 2008

VOB's the evil SOB's.

Well it seems most of the content problems I have are with VOB's. TVersity seems to be the best at streaming the biggest variety of content at the moment, and has the least problems. It's also the lightest weight streamer / transcoder (takes up less CPU and RAM than others I have found). Only problem is it doesn't work all that well with XBox 360. Okay so I can't get it to work AT ALL. :-/

It does work great for a PS3 and instead of buying a slingbox been discussing with co-workers just buying a PS3 for each room instead of a slingbox like equivalent. Divx or Xvid seems to be best. I am thinking about compressing a VOB to see if that works a bit better, just to see if it's the full MPEG2 format of the VOB choking the PS3. I am also going to hopefully get a VOB from a co-worker that works fine on his system. His name is Burt, he's given me great advice and a good person to bounce ideas off.

Reason I know this is the problem is I copied VOB's to the PS3 and they also exhibit the same weird behavior as they do when being streamed to the DLNA, albiet not quite as bad. Upon forwarding and reversing kind of freezes up now and again and during playback it will freeze on a frame for a few seconds. The VOB on the hard drive of the PS3 never freezes completely, but through some of the streamers it will. This is something it does not do with any AVI files with Divx or Xvid. It's almost like the PS3 is made to work better with those two formats than any other formats it supports.

Converting my videos to that format would suck big time though as it takes a better part of an evening to do one DVD. If anyone has some information on this or can shed some light, just comment on this post and I will add it to the main blog at some point.

More homework yet to do! More to come!

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