Sunday, October 12, 2008

More info on the Streaming Stuff!

More woes on the streaming front!!

No matter what I do VOBs are definitely a problem with the PS3. The Xbox 360 won’t play them unless they are transcoded as they are streamed, but I haven’t been able to get TVersity to do this properly either.

I have also tested various codecs, re-encoding my videos and doing just about anything and everything I can to find the best setting or codec and what's the worst. It takes a rather long time to do this and I have still not come to a conclusion that I can be comfortable with yet, I only have a few hours here and there every night to devote so I think this hunt will take me a little longer yet.

I can say I have re-encoded my videos to Divx and XVid AVI's and the PS3 loves those, eats them for breakfast. It will fast forward, play, pause and play later (days later) at the same spot I had them paused. All of this while never once skipping a beat, pausing forever (locked video) or jumping a bit and audio getting out of sync. There is a loss of quality here though (I could probably squeeze more out if I tweaked the encoding options on the software I have), but I can perceive the loss of quality and it bugs the crap out of me. Not only that but re-encoding these videos takes many hours.

A few people I know have the same problem. It seems uncompressed VOBs are really the issue. If I compress the VOBs, even if I just say "Automatic" but don't set a limit, there are absolutely no problems with those VOBs.

I have heard talk about the Apple TV device being pretty decent after you mod it. I will get details and post here on both the Apple TV and the mod package to apply. I understand the modded device apparently will play formats directly over the network, no need for a DLNA streaming server or to transcode.

I am thinking about the same, but for nearly $200 for the device, I could put another $100 and get a PS3 if only it would handle everything.

I also really want to keep my VOBs uncompressed; they look the BEST this way. I have tested compressed and uncompressed VOBs and I can tell the difference, at least in my setup. I have a KDL-52W3000 52” Sony Bravia which I love. Some of the people I know cannot tell the difference or it does not matter to them, or perhaps their setup hides it better, but for me I really can tell the difference. Not only this but in the future I want to be able to stream high def content and if my setup cannot even handle normal DVD uncompressed VOBs I think I am in trouble when I go to HD content. Note: Everything I have tried so far is does not include any HD or Blue Ray content.

Back to the grind of trying to find a good solution for me.. any comments are appreciated.

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