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Experience w/ Music Video Library + PS3 = LAME
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jazee
Junior Member
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4. January 2010 @ 15:18 |
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I've have all these music video DVDs. I'm tech savvy consumer with not a ton of time on my hands but I'm a quick learner. Recently I started playing around with my PS3 and Media Server software (Tversity, PS3MediaServer) and saw the potential for creating a music video library.
Everyone has a music library these days, usually based on MP3s. But now high-quality video is getting down to manageable filesizes with MP4. There are lots of websites with huge libraries of songs that you can buy and download (Amazon, Rhapsody, iTunes, etc). So first I decided to see how many websites I could go buy MP4 music videos in DVD, or near-DVD quality. None, zilch. This struck me as rather odd considering supposedly the recording industry sales have been hurting in recent years and they blame it on pirating of digital media. Not to say no MP4s are being shared illegally, but if I were hurting on revenues I'd be looking to create as many new revenue streams as possible. Why the industry isn't providing MP4s videos of the corresponding songs (when available) is a bit of a mystery to me? But hey, they are a slow and stupid industry based on their track record of how they've embraced (or fought rather) digital media, so why should I be surprised?
The only reason I can think of is that the industry possibly believes that the average consumer doesn't have either the bandwidth and/or the storage capacity to make buying and downloading videos and easy, frustration-free process? So once again, I have to accept the fact I'm "ahead of the times" even though there so many others out there that are way ahead of me with their use of digital media in their home media center setups, etc. I was actually at a club where the DJ mixed music videos and asked him where he bought all the videos from. He said he got them from a DJ video pool and confirmed there is no place to buy music videos like you can buy songs.
So I decide to go ahead and rip all my music video DVDs to my server PC for playback on my PS3. I was thinking at parties it would be great to play music videos instead of just music. Plus my music video DVDs are getting progressively scratched up (mostly from my kids I guess) and I need to back them up anyway.
Finding the right tools and processes to rip my DVDs so that I achieve the quality, filesize, and organization I wanted was not an easy task. I'll spare you the gory details of my learning process and the 8 or so software programs I tried. However once I found the software I liked and got the settings to where I wanted them, it was smooth sailing from there. But the week or two I had to spend reading, downloading, testing, etc, proved that this is still a task left to the tech savvy enthusiasts and not your average consumer. While there are simplified programs like DVDFab, they lack the features/settings to really produce decent results. Bottom line, ripping individual music videos versus a whole movie can be a little trickier. Of course there is issues with movies about trying to preserve the menu etc, but this essay is on creating a music video library.
One thing about the ripping process that completely baffled me was the lack of tagging that you commonly find in MP3s. When you browse a directory of MP4's you only see filenames. With MP3's, when you browse a library using most any media player and you see all sorts of information like Title, Artist, Album, etc. When you rips a music CD, most programs are smart enough to automatically recognize which album it is, create appropriate filenames and tag the MP3s with the artist, album, title and other information. Not so with MP4s. When ripping music video DVDs you need to first separate all the songs into chapter files, then manually name all MP4s. It's a pain compared to ripping music CDs. I am just baffled that chapter titles are not stored on the DVDs and that the ripping programs can't just read them like they read track titles on CDs. I imagine the standards are just not there to achieve this, but bottom line is there really is nothing making it impossible to do this if the standards were setup right. It appears most DVD ripping programs can at least read the disc title and there should be a database where it can go lookup the chapter/track titles, artist name and other info just like most CD ripping programs and media players can read CDDB. Am I missing something or is the state of affairs with DVD ripping and MP4 tagging really that far behind as far behind MP3s/AACs?
So after ripping a bunch of music videos, I was having some people over for a party and was going to impress them with my music video library instead of just playing MP3s through my stereo. Being so busy with other things, I didn't get a chance to make a playlist until right before the party. To my horror, I found using both Tversity or PS3MediaServer with my PS3, if I opened a .PLS or .M3U playlist of videos it showed all the videos, but unlike a music playlist on the PS3 where you play the first song and the PS3 automatically plays the next song in the playlist, with a video playlist, the PS3 only plays one video in the playlist at a time! Are you frickin kidding me?
So then as an experiment (and being desperate) I decided to copy a few videos to the PS3 hard drive to see if I could add them to a playlist. Because I noticed that you cannot browse photos and music from a media server and add them to a playlist, you can only do that for photos and music stored locally on the PS3. And you can't do it for videos even if the videos are stored locally on the PS3 hard disk. Obviously Sony envisioned the video portion of their system for playing movies one at a time and not music videos. That's understandable but why not just make everything operate consistently across media types instead of purposely leaving features out depending on media type?
To continue the PS3 rant of this story... there's been other things I've recently discovered about my PS3 that have lead me to believe Sony did not invest a lot in the braintrust that designed the thing. You would think you can just stick an SD card with photo organized into year a month folders into the PS3 and copy them over. After all the PS3 is just another computer that you can even install a different operating system on if you want. Well first of all they all need to be in a directory call 'Picture' not 'Pictures' not 'Photos' but 'Picture' What the? Next you soon discover (or maybe don't discover) the PS3 can copy any files more than two folder levels deep. So if you had a folder 2001, then a sub-folder January, then a subfolder Disneyland, if you copied the 2001 folder, the PS3 won't see the files in the Disneyland subfolder. Are you kidding me!? Then to make matter worse, the PS3 pretty much ignores your own folder organization of the files and attempts to read the date the photo was taken. If that date is missing or corrupted, it will assume the photo was taken the day you copied it. Great. Luckily out of my 1,200 photos I only had to edit EXIM info to correct the date taken on about 50.
So in summary,
1) Sony needs to improve their PS3 interface when being used as a media player, specifically add the ability for video playlists and the ability to have mixed media playlists - play a song, then play a video, then play a song. Note that Tversity actually claims it supports mixed playlists (see http://tversity.com/playlists-in-tversity/) NOT - at least not on the PS3.
2) Someone needs to start a DVDDB database so ripping programs can automatically tag MP4 files assuming there is a standard for tagging MP4 files - if not, lets have one. (I was able to manually tag MP4 files using my Media Monkey Media Player but who knows what other programs will read them if there isn't a standard?)
3) The Recording Industry needs to get a clue. If they are making revenue off music videos and live concert DVDs, why not make them downloadable? Oh but no one watches music videos, that's why there's a half dozen channels on TV with them. Sigh.
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imanewguy
Member
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4. January 2010 @ 15:30 |
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actually you CAN have the ps3 play multiple videos sequentially if they are stored locally. just go to the video settings and i think the option should be there.
it is hard to find music vids especially if they are old and you want them in hd
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jazee
Junior Member
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4. January 2010 @ 15:33 |
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Originally posted by imanewguy:
actually you CAN have the ps3 play multiple videos sequentially if they are stored locally. just go to the video settings and i think the option should be there.
it is hard to find music vids especially if they are old and you want them in hd
Just found the setting and tested it. The official Sony documentation says "videos on the hard drive or removable storage" but it works for streaming media server playlists. Hurray!
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CrisKahn2
Senior Member
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4. January 2010 @ 15:59 |
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Wow dude looks like you have been struggling with this. I guess it does take a lot of research and trial and error if you dont know what you are doing. I dont know if you are down with downloading torrents (aka pirating). Because its easy to download music vids via torrents they usually come in a huge bundle (like the charts top 100)
Creating a playlist isnt necessary for vids its easier to just put them in seperate folders. The playlist option is mostly meant for music. Although a mixed media playlist would be a nice option.
So to fix your PS3 music video media dilemma you should go to a torrent site and download a music video bundle. And they should be all in either mp4 or avi format so the PS3 will play them. Put them all in one folder in your PC and have it stream to your PS3 or copy it to your PS3 its up to you. Its really not that difficult.
To do it without using a torrent site is way too complicated. Im sure you already know that lol.
PS3...it only does everything(that Sony allows it to)
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jazee
Junior Member
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4. January 2010 @ 16:26 |
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I'm 41. Theres a lot of music videos (some of the best like Peter Gabriel's stuff) that I want that aren't recent top 100.
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CrisKahn2
Senior Member
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4. January 2010 @ 16:31 |
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I was using it as an example. You can download all sorts of music vids using a torrent. Give it a try.
PS3...it only does everything(that Sony allows it to)
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jazee
Junior Member
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4. January 2010 @ 16:37 |
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I actually have, quite a bit in fact. I use Limewire. In my post you'll notice I mentioned DVD-quality or near DVD-quality. Most of the download are nowhere near. A near-DVD quality video filesize is typically in the 50-100MB size per video. 95% of all the video downloads are a lot smaller resolution and/or quality as they are more designed to be watched on a web page or a computer or linked to or e-mailed to someone, or watched on an iPod. 720x480 high-quality video is a pretty big file and requires either considerable time or a powerful computer to encode. I've got a powerful quad-processor computer, just bought 5 months ago with 6GB ram and super fast video card and to do high-quality encodes at 720x480 it manages about 35FPS. It's easy to queue a batch of them and run it overnight though. But your average torrent users isn't producing these kind of files. I have found some do, you just have to pick through all the crap to find some high quality stuff. a 100-video 'pack' of DVD quality would be close to a 10GB file. Even with broadband, that by today's standards is pretty huge to be downloading.
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CrisKahn2
Senior Member
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4. January 2010 @ 20:22 |
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10 gigs is nothing nowadays. With blu ray 1080p rips being around 10gigs a movie ppl are downloading them within a day or two. 1TB HDDs arent that expensive anymore.
Anyways enjoy your PS3...
PS3...it only does everything(that Sony allows it to)
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AfterDawn Addict
2 product reviews
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5. January 2010 @ 13:19 |
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Am not sure if Vidzone is available in your region mate, but if it is, deffo download it from PSN and install.
Not all artists can be found on it, but you do have the ability to create your playlist prior to your party kick off and just let it play away.
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