Besides gaming, the Sony PlayStation 3 is an excellent device for high definition video playback. Besides Blu-ray disc playback support, the PS3 can also play high definition video files, which can be downloaded from the Internet. The most common HD video file format is currently the Matroska (.MKV) file format, which the PS3 does not currently support. The .MKV files however in many cases contain AVC encoded video with AC3 audio, which are PS3 supported formats. In order to play the files a simple process of converting the .MKV files to .m2ts files must be performed, but with the free tsMuxeR software this is very simple to achieve and takes only a few minutes.
Preconditions
- tsMuxeR software. Download from here and extract to appropriate folder
- Matroska .MKV video files with AVC (h.264) video and AC3 audio streams
Make sure you have some free space on your hard drive as a file with roughly the same size than the original file will be created in this process.
Using tsMuxeR
The conversion process using tsMuxeR is a very simple one. It consists of adjusting a few settings, which you can see highlighted in the screenshot on the right.
The video or audio content is not actually converted at all. All tsMuxeR does is that it extracts (demuxes) the video and audio from the Matroska .MKV file and wraps them (muxes) to a .m2ts transport stream format. The video or audio remain untouched, so the quality is not impacted and the process is very fast.
Perform the following steps:
- Open a .MKV file with AVC/AC3 content using the Add button
- Observe the track info for AVC profile information. If it shows a value higher than 4.1, then use the Change level function to adjust it down to 4.1
- Choose M2TS muxing as Output
- Click browse button and choose the name and location for your file
- Click Start muxing to begin
After a few minutes you should have files named filename.m2ts and filename.meta. Now all you need to do is to burn these on a DVD-R(W), and slip the disc to your PS3. The PlayStation recognizes the file on the disc allowing high definition video playback!