Tuesday 3 March 2009

Changes and features of PS3 Media Server

some time has passed since the last version, so here's a major one ! Hopefully, it offers some interesting features to all ps3 owners running on Windows or Linux, like the DTS streaming support (no need anymore to encode in AC3 or PCM if you have a DTS compatible receiver), an improved Mencoder engine with automatic decision between muxing (aka no video encoding) and full video transcoding. About the DTS feature, make sure to read carefully the message box who will appear if you enable this option. Also, the automatic muxing option is enabled by default, to offer the best video quality when this is possible (if the video track is compatible and no subtitles are involved). Keep in mind that it's a new feature, so if anything bad happens, you can disable it in the mencoder configuration panel (or in the #Video Settings# virtual menu on XMB). There's other things to try, check the changelog !

PS3 Media Server v1.10.1 for Windows/Linux - v1.10 for OSX

the 1.10.1 version fixed a last minute bug, not related to OSX

Here's the change log:

Changes / Features : Windows/Linux

DTS / DTS-HD core audio tracks are now streamable without reencoding (DVD ISOs not supported yet)
New Option: unification of Mencoder/tsMuxer engines, including:
. Automatic choice between H264 muxing or transcoding, based on AVC Level 4.1 compatibility and subtitles configuration
. Remux on the fly any H264 content from MOV, MP4, and AVI containers (ex: Apple HD Trailers)
. This option is enabled by default and can be disabled via the #Video Settings# virtual menu if anything goes wrong
TS/M2TS support improvement
2 channels downmixing support with PCM conversion

Changes / Features : All Platforms

XBox 360 unofficial support (Pictures/Music/Videos : WMV8/WMA2 transcoding)
Mencoder archive handling (no seeking support)
Simplified copy (always available, no more option), and much faster with remuxed videos
Alternate subtitles directory
Multi language external subtitles support
Automatic album art download from amazon or discogs
Option to display more recents file first in a directory
Ability to generate video thumbnails with Mplayer
New translations: Romanian (thanks to Marinescu Alexandru Cezar), Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese (thanks to KK Tong)
Updated translations: Finnish, German, Greek, Icelandic, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Swedish


Fixes

Reworked RSS parsing (youtube playlists)
Reworked Audio/Subtitles tracks handling
Better stability in LPCM and DTS handling
Fixed LPCM channel ordering
Wrong font detection on some systems: subtitles weren't loaded
Fixed tsMuxer crash at the end of file
Modified UPNP discovery