Oldtaku: Anime for Grownups

Streaming Anime Subs From Your PC to Console with ps3mediaserver

August 23, 2010 at 10:15 pm | Posted in anime, utilities | 2 Comments

What it Does

If you have a PC in the living room you don’t need this. But if your big huge HDTV is in the living room and you want to watch subbed anime on it, it’s a real pain. DVD is easy of course, but most subbed anime that’ll never come out in the US, like Astro Fighter Sunred, comes as mkv these days which is a royal pain in the ass to deal with on media appliances. Neither the PS3 or XBox 360 will play them native with subs. And don’t even think about the Wii. ps3mediaserver can ease the pain.

Not just for PS3

First, don’t let the name fool you -it’s ‘ps3mediaserver’ for historical reasons, but it’ll serve to any upnp media client. This guide is for the PS3 and X360, which can handle almost anything you throw at them, but it should work for any client if you cut the bitrates far enough.

You’ll Need Java (for the UI)

Before you go ‘noooooooo’, ps3mediaserver uses ffmpeg to do the heavy lifting, so you’re not trying to transcode HD video streams in Java. The Java UI lets it run on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux, which is quite convenient.  Download Java here.

Initial Install

Grab ps3mediaserver from http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/. Second tab at the top, download the install for your system, install it.

Now the fun part – run it, and you’ll get ‘Java PS3 Media Server vblahblah’ – the interface is a little strange. Unless your PS3 is actually powered on your Status tab will show a BIG RED X like the world is ending. Don’t worry. You don’t need any clients on at this point.

Go to the General Configuration tab – you might want to ‘Install as a Windows Service’ to keep it running in the background, or ‘Prevent OS from sleeping while streaming.’  On the Navigation/Share Settings tab, down at the bottom you will probably want to add (+) a directory where you’ll have all your subbed anime sitting. All this stuff you can set as you like.

Transcoding Settings

Transcoding Settings tab is where all the action is. Choose each page in the configuration tree on the left side as we go along.

‘Common transcode settings’

You probably want to set the ‘Number of cores used’. Set it to at least 2; 4 if you have 8 cores; if you have 4 cores then 4 if you don’t mind eating all your CPU while transcoding, otherwise 2.

‘Maximum Bandwidth’: This one is really important if you’re streaming over Wifi. It takes some experimenting, but I find that 8-12 works well on 802.11g for my environment. Too low and everything looks ugly. Too high and you get video pausing.  If you’re going over ethernet, feel free to set this to 0.  Low power clients: if you have one of those non-beefy clients I was mentioning before you may need to cut this down to a bitrate it can handle. Just keep lowering to 6, 4, 2, 1, till it works. Also see ‘Use Video Scaler’ on the MEncoder page.

‘Mpeg2 Video quality settings’: I set this to ‘Good quality for Wifi HD”. You may be able to go higher, but lossless is ridiculous.

Important: Finally, in Misc Options, make sure ‘Definitely disable subtitles’ is off and ‘Force transcode for the following extensions’ is set to ‘mkv’. It seems wasteful, but I’ve run into cases where subs wouldn’t show without it.

MEncoder

You probably want to enable ‘Enhanced multicore support’. It has warnings, but it seems to work for me and you definitely want the extra heavy lifting power for those HD shows.

‘Use Video Scaler’ is useful for low power devices. No use serving up 720p to an N800. Check this then set the Width and Height to the screen size of your media player. Otherwise leave this off and let the console do the scaling up.

UPDATE: ‘Custom options’ – some subbers are lazy bastards and don’t even bother to label the subtitle languages with a language code, so neither en or eng works. Use ‘-sid 0′ here to try to get it to use the first subtitle track even if it has no label.

‘Audio language priority’ can be whatever you want, usually ‘jp,jpn,en,eng’.  Those listed first are chosen first.

‘Subtitles language’ should be ‘en,eng’ or your native language.  ‘fr,fre,en,eng’ would choose french first then fall back to english.

Important: ‘Audio/Subtitles language priority’ is the important one: ‘jpn,eng;jp,eng;jpn,en;jp,en’. I find subs are inconsistent with the naming, so you need to give all four possible combinations of ‘japanese audio + english subtitles’. Again, add your native subtitle language as desired.

I set ‘Autoload *.src/*.sub subtitles’  to on, but I’ve never actually tried it.

Save it and Try It

Hit the ‘Save’ button at the top of the panel, then fire up your console. On XBox 360, go to My Xbox, My Videos. After a second or so a ‘PS3 Media Server [mypc]‘ should show up on the left. Select it, browse your videos, watch away! On PS3, go to Videos on the XMB. If you don’t see ‘PS3 Media Server [mypc]‘, then  ‘Discover Media Servers’. Watch!

Settings from the Console

You can access the special #Video Settings# and #Transcode# folders from the list of ‘Videos’, which give you some extra control from the console if you need it for a given picky video. Settings show up as fake videos you can toggle on and off.

Some Limitations

The biggest limitation is that you can’t fast forward or reverse effectively. Transcoding means that it looks like a big long stream which is delivered on demand. But pause works as expected.