So recently I was able to format a 160gb external HDD to use with my PS3. Everything so far works great except one issue: since the HDD is formatted to FAT32 the PS3 (or HDD?) will not recognize files over 4gb (or so it seems). I have been copying a few movies into MPEG4 to play on the PS3 and doing it at very high quality so that I can get the full HD effect on my 52" TV, however, a couple of these movies are well over 4gb when finished. I guess my questions are: 1) is there a way to get the drive (or PS3) to recognize the bigger files, or, 2) Is there a better format to convert the files to which still is High Def but smaller in size and/or, 3)Is there a GOOD free video "splitter" software that can split the files in two so they are a bit smaller?
Remember that I am a noob and any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you.
1.) The internal drive supports files over 4GB. You can get a internal-to-external adapter allowing you to connect 2TB or more of internal storage, with no file size limits.
2.) You can use AVCHD...this will let you do it lossless-ly...but the files will be even bigger. There are a lot of things involved in getting a high-quality, yet small-size file. I have seen 2GB compressed versions of movies that look better than 4GB compressed versions...it's all about the settings.
3.) There are free slitters for most file formats.
2.) If you do it losslessly in an AVCHD folder, then you can use tsMuxer to split the individual files so that they're less than 4GB in size. Then you can use a program called "AVCHD Manager" to format the files so that the PS3 will read it almost as if it's a Blu-Ray disc.
Note, though, that lossless means video from 20-50 GB in size (Transformers 2 = 41.7 GB), which will fill up your hard drive extremely quickly.
3.) tsMuxer is able to split any H264-encoded video into sub-4GB chunks - this includes most HD .mp4 files. For .avi and other "SD" video formats, you probably won't need to split the files.
