HV20 footage on the PS3

[Chrisman!]

I find that the PS3 is a great resource for viewing footage created by the HV20. One problem- there's a glitch somewhere that doesn't seem to allow for 100% compatibility.

Here's the setup:
-I've shot multiple scenes with varying settings, 24P, HDV, 24P w/Cinemode, HDV w/ Cinemode, etc.
-Scene Capture using Vegas
-Burn the raw .m2t files to DVD-R
-PS3 (fw v1.70) recognizes thd DVD-R as a data disc and will pull the list of .m2t files up under the video menu option.
-The PS3 will not play *some* of the files citing "corrupted data" but play others just fine
-The "corrupted" .m2t files will play just fine in Media Player 11 (from the same DVD)
-I've tried burning the disk with different files / as UDF / etc, but the same files always will not play.

I can't seem to isolate this to a specific settting or option on the camera when I'm shooting. Based on the fact that the same files always have issues, I'm guessing it might have something to do with a partial field at the beginning of the clip or some other slight problem.

Any Ideas?

[davespectrum]

I'm picking up an HV20 in a few weeks, and I have a PS3 as well. I was going to try a few tests with that too so I'll see what I can work out. I edit in Premiere, hopefully that produces better results than Vegas did. The PS3 is strange for formats though.

The latest PS3 updates (1.82 is the newest one) have more support for video formats so try updating and see if there is a difference.

[Checky]

hmm also interested in this , any results yet guys?

[Goose]

Im intererested too - Is it a PAL HV20 / PS3?

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

I already explained how to properly playback on the PS3 *and* the Xbox360 here: http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2007/08/11/from-dvhdvavchd-to-ps3xbox360appletv/
The answer is h.264.

[Goose]

I already explained how to properly playback on the PS3 *and* the Xbox360 here: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=101033
The answer is h.264.

Eugenia the discussion here is how to play back raw m2t's on a PS3. Obviously you can recompress but thats not what Im interested in.

[Eugenia Loli-Queru]

Right. Try re-capturing the .m2t files from tape using HDVSplit this time. If you have the same problem then it's PS3's bug. If not, then it's Vegas'.

[Atak_Snajpera]

Most likely it's PS3 BUG. Check this thread: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=120627
Let's hope new firmware 2.0 will solve this problem as well as 2GB limit for mp4

[Lucasberg]

I have played many raw clips on my PS3 with no problem yet but I have not tried 24P . If I have time I will film some 24P and see if it plays on my PS3.

[Chrisman!]

The issue here was any firmware on the PS3 of 1.70 and older. This has since been fixed in PS3 v1.80 and newer. Again, the reason to burn the RAW .m2t files to a disk is to view the footage with no change or recompression. This gives you the best possible scenario to check your footage. Also, this works with all footage from the HV20 regardless of 60i or 24p.

I have tested this process using both ISO and UDF and it works GREAT. So, why the different formats? If you have a bunch of shorter clips, i.e. no .m2t file is more than 2GB, you can use the ISO format to burn the disk. If you have any files larger than 2GB, you'll need to use the UDF format.

Disc authoring and playback:
To play these discs in the PS3, you simply need to insert them, select "Data Disc" when it appears under the data menu, and select the clip you want to play. The PS3 will not (as far as I can tell) play all the clips, but instead stops after each clip. Here’s my solution (for a PC):

1) Put all the clips you want to play into a folder (make sure they total below 4.7GB or 8.5GB)*
2) Open a command prompt and change to that folder.
3) From the command prompt type: “copy /B *.m2t ..\footage.m2t”. To break this down: this basically just takes all the clips in the current folder and glues them together (without any changes) into a single file in the folder above. So if you are using c:\clips, the resulting file will be c:\footage.m2t
4) Burn “footage.m2t” to the root of a UDF disc (since the compiled clips will likely be larger than 2GB).
5) When you play this in the PS3 it will string all of your clips together. Although you do get small corruptions (for about 15 frames) at the beginning of each clip as it waits to find a new I frame.

As for playback length, at a 25Mbps data rate (HDV footage) I calculate just over 45 minutes of footage on a DVD+R DL disc (8.5GB) and just over 25 minutes of footage on a single layer disc (4.7GB). At least for what I have been shooting, 45 minutes of footage is often sufficient for a single event. Taking into account that you could further edit the footage down, 45 minutes should be completely sufficient.

*it should be noted that while DVDs are labeled 4.7GB or 8.5GB this is a bit of a misnomer. These discs are 4.7 x 10^9 and 8.5x10^9 bytes per disc. While this may not seem significant, 1KB is actually 1,024 bytes, 1MB is 1,024KB, etc. Extrapolating this to size of the DVDs we find that a single layer DVD is actually 4.377GB and a dual layer disc is 7.916GB.