Digital storage is relatively cheap these days. You can buy a 2 TB hard drive for home for about $60 on sale. I’m a geek and when the PS3 slim came out I figured it was a good time to get this BluRay player, game system, and media center all in one. The problem is, 160 GB doesn’t hold a ton, they don’t tell you that Dolby Digital (via bitstream) is off by default even for DVD/BluRay discs, and there is no easy way to play movies or FLAC files.
If you’re scratching your head at some of the letters I just spit out, let’s rewind a bit. Below I will list a common ailment with home media and PS3, and my recommendations for a fix.
1) No surround sound, Dolby Digital, or DTS from PS3 when playing disc
This is due to a silly default setting under “System Settings”, “Audio Settings”, “Audio Type”, change it from “Linear PCM” to “Bitstream”. Assuming you have a receiver that can decode Dolby Digital or DTS, this will fix it for you.
2) No surround sound, Dolby Digital, or DTS from PS3 when playing movie file on hard drive
See #1, but if that doesn’t fix the problem, it’s likely due to the format the movie file is in. The quickest, easiest way to retain surround sound when ripping a DVD is to rip it as “VOB pass-thru”. The video and audio quality will be superb, but the drawback is the filesize will be 3 to 5 GB for an average length movie.
3) No surround sound, Dolby Digital, or DTS from PS3 when playing movie file streamed from NAS
If #1 and #2 didn’t fix the problem, try using Windows for a media server and running free software such as PS3mediaserver or TVersity. I have had the most luck with TVersity as far as speed and sync issues. ps3mediaserver has a lot of options for remuxing, but I had issues with .vob files and surround sound when using it.
4) No thumbnail images next to movies
Tversity doesn’t seem to support thumbnails, but ps3mediaserver does. It will get them from Amazon by default, or you can use almost any image, just append the filename with “.cover.png” You can make some pretty cool thumbnails with this awesome site, http://www.worldinhidef.com/ps3ms/thumbnailgenerator/
5) Not enough space on PS3 to store all of my movies
I would highly recommend buying either a USB external hard drive, or turn your PC into a streaming media server using Tversity or PSmediaserver. I will write another post about building a home server that is resilient to hard drive faults.
6) MP3 are lossy I want my music preserved with highest quality
MP3 is okay if 192 Kbps or higher bit rate, but you should know that there is still data missing from your music in any MP3. Use FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec. Unlike MP3, no license is required and it sounds way better. Sure filesizes are bigger, but what are a few GB among friends. You can still store a 600+ disc collection with about 1 TB of storage.
So much more can be written on this topic, but hopefully this will get you off to a good start. Feel free to post any comments or questions in the comments.
