PlayStation 3 encoding specs?

[benwaggoner]

Say, are there any good detailed resources on what the PlayStation 3 and PSP support for media files?

I'm looking for the Sony equivalent to this:
http://www.xbox.com/en-AU/support/xbox360/digitalmedia/videoplaybackfaq.htm

[Audionut]

http://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps3/current/video/filetypes.html

[benwaggoner]

http://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps3/current/video/filetypes.html
Yeah, I Binged that pretty quickly. But it's entirely default of Profile@Level, peak bitrate, and other information useful for encoding content.

Now, the Cell's decoding monster, so I can believe it if it can handle any 1080p resolution of any supported format. But somehow things are are always a little more complicated than that :).

Plus this is Sony, who brought us the amazing CABAC-only PSP...

[Audionut]

From my own tests, it can handle level 4.1 with dxva specs.

ie: I've had it play files with peak bitrates of upto 60000 kbit/s and 3 refs for 1080p.
It's been awhile since i've done tests as I just use PS3 media server these days, and unfortunately I am unable to run some more tests atm.

[CruNcher]

@ benwaggoner
you would have to ask Sony for the exact Spec last time i read about it there was a big "Confidential" ontop (at least for the PSP but those where the UMD Specs) ;)


Now, the Cell's decoding monster, so I can believe it if it can handle any 1080p resolution of any supported format. But somehow things are are always a little more complicated than that .

Yeah these days almost every Device Restriction works via the Firmware, even if the Hardware is capable of certain things it might be not yet official active (funny new world, bill gates spoke about this new power when he left the stage the last time) though i have my doubts industry gets away with it in the long run ;).
Sony really showed what for a Power Manufactures have with this restrictions (but it also showed that it doesn't holdup for long) in the end they opened even the Full SD mode (and gave up on the bitrate restrictions) for Average Customer (though that also was pure luck as UMD died, wouldn't have happen that fast if UMD was a succees not officialy at least ;) ) or gone away from their Sony MP4s only (heavy pressure against them their) ;) (Not to speak about the Firmware Hacking in the background, which was another pressure point on them)

So in the end every Decision they made was slowly diminished by user Demands (or in the hard case "actions", unfortunately lot of illegal stuff too) and you could see how the whole thing broke apart with every official new firmware release (great thing) :)
Hopefully no one else trys something as heavy as their approach has been and learned from this (looking over @ the Zune-HD)

[m3mbran3]

I have encoded SD content using the megui unrestricted 1 pass crf 20 setting which played fine on the ps3. So from that I can say that it can at least play files with b-pyramid (not default for DXVA profiles).

[Wishbringer]

@m3mbran3
x264 sets level depending on other settings automatically.
So your encode isn't necessary "unrestricted"

For SD (PAL) content my last try&forgot encodes showed that PS3 can handle 8 ref and 16 bframes
But I had to stay in 4.1 specs.

[Schrade]

@ benwaggoner
you would have to ask Sony for the exact Spec last time i read about it there was a big "Confidential" ontop (at least for the PSP but those where the UMD Specs) ;)

Wow, cool! Your confidential hint helped me find a nice UMD Video document on Sony's website! I just searched for "psp umd video specifications confidential" and boom there it is, available to the public on their website. I've been trying to find stuff like this for a while now.

[kieranrk]

The PS3 supports Level 4.2 as well.

[popper]

indeed if you read and look at his video sample here
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-ps3-blitzes-blu-ray-specs-blog-entry
you can get to his Devil May Cry 4 Intro 1080p60\AVCHD\BDMV\STREAM\00000.MTS
High@L4.2,ref=4, 30.2 Mbps, 1920x1080, 16/9, 59.940 fps,PAL.

"The encoding required is somewhat specialist and I had to get it done out of house"
he's right a 60fps PAL encode is weard, virtually exactly 10 fps above the 50fps PAL standard but apparently the PS3 can play it, i assume its a Uk PAL PS3 he used for playback ;)

"...The story kicks off with the release of the Sanyo HD2000 camera. Capable of recording 1080p60 video directly into MP4 files, enterprising souls on the Doom9 video forum set about getting clips from this camera to play on standalone BD players, despite the fact there was little hope of it actually working.

However, for a while now hackers have been working on reverse-engineering the AVCHD format – the consumer-level sibling to full Blu-ray used by a multitude of HD video cameras. Coder "DeanK", author of the MultiAVCHD authoring tool found that with some effort, clips from the Sanyo camera would work within his tool when played back on PS3. ...."

its a shame the current 360 firmware installed codecs will not play smoothly above that extreamly low MS artificially set firmware max limit of 10Mbit,ref=3,H@L4.1 i already mentioned elsewere, you really need go ask the 360 codec team to vastly improve and refactor them for better Altivec use right up to at least generic BR data rates if not the same as the currently over spec BR PS3 Codec and container capabilitys above, and have them also add the transport stream, AVCHD, and mkv containers at the very least Ben, ASAP,the so called "play to" Win7 capabilitys and the broken MS non standard 360 DLNA client are not going to be very useful to most here without them being fixed for todays and tomorrows generic Encoded HD content http://on10.net/blogs/nic/Windows-7-Play-To-feature-turns-your-PC-into-a-Universal-Remote-Control/

try Encoding these yourself, beetlejuice (were their stood in and pan across the road and court yard, looking up at the windows, upto the ghost floating off the bed and looking back at them through the window, a few minutes of clip i dont have any more alas), 11Mbit,ref=3 and 10Mbit,ref=4 at 1920x1080 fails to play back smoothly every time, and thats no were near a hard clip to decode im sure...

[Snowknight26]

its a shame the current 360 firmware installed codecs will not play smoothly above that extreamly low MS artificially set firmware max limit of 10Mbit,ref=3,H@L4.1

The 360 will play content that's higher bitrate than that. 10Mbps is the safe limit that they guarantee will run flawlessly. Though that doesn't mean that you can't get smooth playback with higher bitrates. Infact, I've gotten at least 16Mbps to play just fine so I don't know where you got that info from.

Nice lack of periods, though.

[popper]

not in my experience, streaming directly with 1.20 PS3 media server/tversity (without trancoding etc),and USB stick.

if you have direct URLs for any average AVC HD.mp4 clips that are higher than 10Mbit,ref=3,1920x1080p that you assume will play smoothly there.

ill willingly try it again, but so far nothing greater has EVER played without stuttering for me, on this 9 month old UK PAL 360 arcade/200gigHD/HDMi to 32" LCDTV, from this core2 E4400/2gig ram,1gig wired LAN.

the logical conclusion is the currently provided firmware codecs and containers are outdated and need to be rewritten to take far better advantage of the Altivec SIMD and deployed in a new 360 firmware, as its clear the 360 PPC/Altivec CPUs are FAR more capable and have more than enough proccessing power for this basic task, or is there a far more serious Hardware design problem here that a simple firmware codec/container update cant ever fix?.

[kolak]

PS3 can play files above Blu-ray spec, but if you stick to it than you have 100% guarantee for smooth playback.

Andrew

[benwaggoner]

PS3 can play files above Blu-ray spec, but if you stick to it than you have 100% guarantee for smooth playback.

Assuming the PS3 is limited to 1080p, is there anything beyond Blu-ray could/would you want to do? Does it support 1080p60?

[CruNcher]

Wow, cool! Your confidential hint helped me find a nice UMD Video document on Sony's website! I just searched for "psp umd video specifications confidential" and boom there it is, available to the public on their website. I've been trying to find stuff like this for a while now.

Which document is this i mean if it's public you can post the link ;)

[kolak]

Assuming the PS3 is limited to 1080p, is there anything beyond Blu-ray could/would you want to do? Does it support 1080p60?

It should play fine, I think. I may try:)

It couldn't do 1080p at 200Mbit :(- hehehe

Andrew

[benwaggoner]

The 360 will play content that's higher bitrate than that. 10Mbps is the safe limit that they guarantee will run flawlessly. Though that doesn't mean that you can't get smooth playback with higher bitrates. Infact, I've gotten at least 16Mbps to play just fine so I don't know where you got that info from.

Yeah, I'd think DXVA specs should do well higher than 10 Mbps peak. The Xbox 360 was decoding 30 Mbps 1080i for HD DVD a couple of years back; there's plenty of power in there.

[kieranrk]

Assuming the PS3 is limited to 1080p, is there anything beyond Blu-ray could/would you want to do?

1080p50/1080p60 4:2:2. :)

[Schrade]

Which document is this i mean if it's public you can post the link ;)

Well, all you need to do is plop those search terms I listed into Google. But here you go:

http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/products/UMDVideoAuthoringIntro.pdf

Edit: Well, it appears it's on a public page, too:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/products/showproduct.asp?PID=991&keycode=3417

[popper]

Yeah, I'd think DXVA specs should do well higher than 10 Mbps peak. The Xbox 360 was decoding 30 Mbps 1080i for HD DVD a couple of years back; there's plenty of power in there.

yeah sure, and the part your forgetting IS the actual seperate HDDVD drive installed/used a totally SEPERATE Codec set for that explicit use, it did NOT use the currently internally 360 installed one.

also clearly you did not look at the link i provided or read the story or even download the file or it would have been clear that referenced clip above was 1080P, the PS3 played it BUT

"Update: The PS3 certainly is full of surprises, and looks like I'm a bit ahead of my time with this demo.

Turns out that while 1080p60 decoding is supported, the PS3 then goes about forcing the image to work only on a 1080i display.

Force 1080p, and it then upscales the "nerfed" image! It took a while to figure that one out, especially as it defies logic: the PS3 is in effect adding to an already massive CPU burden by going through this bizarre process.

So, for the time being, the raw video is supported but the displays are not... once there are more cameras like Sanyo HD2000 on the market, expect this to change. "

[benwaggoner]

yeah sure, and the part your forgetting IS the actual seperate HDDVD drive installed/used a totally SEPERATE Codec set for that explicit use, it did NOT use the currently internally 360 installed one.
Sure. My point was about what the hardware was capable of. And while it's not the exact same decoder, it was build by the same team. I don't know that the performance on the same bitstream would be THAT (like 3x) different.

also clearly you did not look at the link i provided or read the story or even download the file or it would have been clear that referenced clip above was 1080P, the PS3 played it BUT
Yep, I read it. The decoder does 1080p60, but the pipeline doesn't know what to do with it. I'd hope that gets fixed in a future firmware update.

[popper]

1080p50/1080p60 4:2:2. :)

but what bit rate did you play ?, it seems PS3 can do at least 30.2Mbit/s 1080p60, ref=4, 4:2:0 ,AC-3, 384 Kbps ,2 channels as per the linked file above,with the oddball upscaling bug? that probably needs fixing with a firmware update sometime if someone reports it to them

but what about higher bitrates?, if we are trying to work out its real life limits above the generic BR spec.

[kieranrk]

but what bit rate did you play ?

That statement was referring to the "would" part of benwaggonner's question.

[popper]

Sure. My point was about what the hardware was capable of. And while it's not the exact same decoder, it was build by the same team. I don't know that the performance on the same bitstream would be THAT (like 3x) different.


Yep, I read it. The decoder does 1080p60, but the pipeline doesn't know what to do with it. I'd hope that gets fixed in a future firmware update.

we appear to be saying the same thing, i agree the x3 PPC/Altivec is clearly more than capable of processing better than BR data rates,as per that totally seperate software codec decoding WHEN used with the discontinued add-on... if you dont have that your out of luck, and if you do you still have to write all your higher rate content to HDDVD disks as you cant stream them with that device/codec combination etc anyway...

in my experience, and not for the sake of trying, i cant get that assumed UPTO x3+ better data throughput though than that 10Mbit/s as i said, and again, if you make some AVC clips better than that and give the URLs, ill gladly try them on this UK 360 and report back with my revised opinion, and advocate that new higher speed if they do work for me.

we do have a problem though Ben , as you say the same dev team made that extra HDDVD codec, so somones (was?)putting a restriction on the internal 360 codecs max processing throughput on purpose it seems!

can you at least have a word if and when you get time, to see if they are at least open to providing this existing and clearly better written codec/container pack in a near future firmware update, when might the next one be scheduled BTW....

or far better , a total rewite to todays and tomorrows HD streaming standards, to give the generic 360 a lot more viability against the existing PS3 over spec codec/container pack.

hell, if im asking for direct requests put to the 360 firmware devs while their at it....

an internal 360 web browser thats usable for connecting to VLC Multicast streaming data and taking/processing SAP Announces (so i can leave it set on a multicast URL: port of my choosing, and just send anything to that URL: port as i please from any MC app on the LAN,WAN etc) an internal IPv6 dual stack for direct 360 use with any 3rd party IPv6 tunnel providers, go6 http://www.go6.net/4105/download.asp for instance, AND silverlight3 usable core building blocks for the near future, directly inside a new 360 firmware...:thanks:

[hajj_3]

hi benwaggoner, just out of curiosity are these guides for doom9 or are you looking for how to improve the media capabilities of the xbox 360 or something?

dont suppose you could ask the xbox 360 division to add .mkv support please, would be welcomed by millions of 360 users:)

[kieranrk]

Has anybody tried putting linux on the 360 and using ffmpeg-mt?

[Ronin-7]

This might (http://www.edepot.com/playstation3.html) not be what your looking for Ben but its worth checking.

[benwaggoner]

hi benwaggoner, just out of curiosity are these guides for doom9 or are you looking for how to improve the media capabilities of the xbox 360 or something?
This is for the the 2nd edition of my compression book that I hope to finish this epoch, hopefully even this weekend :).

dont suppose you could ask the xbox 360 division to add .mkv support please, would be welcomed by millions of 360 users:)
I think they've heard it :).

Hmmm. I wonder when someone's going to build a managed source MKV parser for Silverlight. It's be able to handle all the fonts and titling stuff pretty easy. And with the H.264 and AAC decoders now, it'd be able to play back the contents of most .MKV files as is...

[CruNcher]

Has anybody tried putting linux on the 360 and using ffmpeg-mt?

Linux worked on the first firmware revisions with the vulnerability issues inside the hypervisor but IMBs eFuses (inside the CPU) where then used to prevent that by self destruction if the firmware was updated and no downgrade was possible then, though there is a hardware way to still downgrade, not sure what happened since then but it's surely a matter of time since some backdoors are found again ;)
You shouldn't forget Microsoft is using the 2nd Generation of Palladium (TCP(A)/NGSC) here and they learned some stuff from the first Hacks and of course improved, though the easiest way for them would have been allowing homebrew in the Design stage ;)
http://www.free60.org/wiki/Main_Page

Some info about the 2nd Palladium Rev Security Improvements,and the Weaknesses
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxjpmc8ZIxM