Tuesday, September 23, 2008

PS3 - Streaming and transcoding xvid on the fly with fuppes on linux

I recently bought myself an PS3 and I'm very happy with it. Except for one thing, the built in support for streaming video is not the best. Currently it only seem to support some types of mpeg or wma files. This is not satisfactory since I've ripped most of my dvds into xvid.

Finding a upnp streaming server for linux wasn't easy. After trying many different upnp streaming servers with DLNA support (ushare and mediatomb among others), I finally found fuppes. It supports streaming and transcoding of media files on the fly. And it works great with PS3 :)

This thread will get you started. But it is filled with xbox 360 questions and other issues:

My setup:
PS3 - firmware 2.43
Ubuntu 7.10 Server (gutsy)
fuppes - svn revision 578

To make it short I did the following to get it to work:
Note that the apt-get install line has been escaped with slashes '\'. Remove them and put everything on one line if you encounter any problems.
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg build-essential libavutil-dev libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev
\ subversion libtool automake autoconf libsqlite3-dev libpcre3-dev libxml2-dev
\ liblame-dev pkg-config

wget http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/fuppes/fuppes-SVN-578.tar.gz
tar xvzf fuppes-SVN-578.tar.gz 
cd fuppes-SVN-578
autoreconf -vfi
./configure --enable-video-transcoding
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig


Download my fuppes.cfg and put it in ~/.fuppes/fuppes.cfg

If you wish to use init.d to control your startup take a look at this howto.

UPDATE - 23. May 2009: Check out my silver bullet post about the ps3mediaserver-project