Convert Sony EX1 Footage for Sony Playstation

You can convert the footage of a Sony PMW-EX1 for direct HD playback on a Sony Playstation 3. Therefor I use ffmpeg which can easily be installed on most Linux distributions with the package managemet system.

I convert on a Fedora 8 x64 using ffmpeg rpm files from Livna.org. Here comes some information on my version of ffmpeg:

[user@kiste ~]$ ffmpeg -v
FFmpeg version SVN-r10703, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –prefix=/usr –incdir=/usr/include/ffmpeg –libdir=/usr/lib64 –shlibdir=/usr/lib64 –mandir=/usr/share/man –arch=x86_64 –extra-cflags=-O2 -g -pipe -Wall -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fexceptions -fstack-protector –param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -m64 -mtune=generic –enable-liba52 –enable-libfaac –enable-libfaad –enable-libgsm –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libogg –enable-libtheora –enable-libvorbis –enable-libxvid –enable-libx264 –enable-pp –enable-pthreads –disable-static –enable-shared –enable-gpl –disable-debug –disable-opts –disable-strip
libavutil version: 49.5.0
libavcodec version: 51.45.0
libavformat version: 51.14.0
built on Oct 18 2007 03:18:27, gcc: 4.1.2 20070925 (Red Hat 4.1.2-31)

Using the following two commands will convert your MP4 copied from the cam into an mp4-file which you can put on a DVD or a streaming-server (like twonky media) an then play it on your PS3. Please mind that it is a two pass encoding for better quality. That’s why you have to run it twice with changed -pass <nr> parameter:

ffmpeg -i <input file>.MP4 -y -vcodec libx264 -acodec libfaac -title ‘<your title>’ -f mp4 -mbd rd -flags 4mv+trell+aic+qprd+mv0 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -flags2 dct8x8+skiprd -level 41 -b 20480kb -bf 3 -ac 2 -ab 128k -threads 2 -pass 1 <output file>.mp4

ffmpeg -i <input file>.MP4 -y -vcodec libx264 -acodec libfaac -title ‘<your title>’ -f mp4 -mbd rd -flags 4mv+trell+aic+qprd+mv0 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -flags2 dct8x8+skiprd -level 41 -b 20480kb -bf 3 -ac 2 -ab 128k -threads 2 -pass 2 <output file>.mp4

Of course you can tune some paramters as the filenames, the title, the bitrate for video and audio. But you need to keep all the other paramters or PS3 won’t play it.

I tried a video bitrate of 35Mbit as the native EX1 codec has this, too. But I had to find out, that in some cases it won’t run continous. Mostly while played from DVD. So I went down to 20Mbit and everything is fine using DVD or streaming over WLAN. You can play around with the bitrate and all the other setting to get the most out of it.

I have tested this with 1080/25p HQ footage I recorded on my EX1. Then copied the footage to the linux machine using USB mass storage. Afterwards converted it using the commands above. The quality is good but could be better. So I’ll carry on tuning the settings if I’ll have some time.

You can download an example file (50MB) here. Burn this on an DVD and feed it into your PS3 or place it on a media server your playstation can reach.