How to watch anime properly on PS3 Media Server
Once again filling in the deficiencies of Google…
Recently, having got a new HDTV, I wanted to replicate all the good things about watching anime on a PC in Media Player Classic HC, except this time on PS3 via the well-known DLNA/uPnP server, PS3 Media Server. Out of the box, and with a little tweaking, I was able to get ASS subtitles more or less working, and it ran reasonably efficiently. However two very important things any anime lover will know were missing:
- Ordered chapters for MKV files
- ffdshow filters, most notably the Debanding filter
After days of experimenting (the biggest struggle being the buffer emptying during playback despite no obvious CPU/GPU/IO/network bottleneck), I finally achieved these in addition to ASS subtitles and everything I had before with just MEncoder.
Hopefully the following instructions will get you the same setup, though they are written in hindsight and I may have missed some crucial details.
- Download and install PS3 Media Server v1.20.412 Beta the latest build of PS3 Media Server Contrib
- Download and install the latest version of Combined Community Codec Pack (default settings should work)
- Download and install the latest SVN 32-bit copy of ffdshow tryouts, of which you probably want ICL10 – if your CPU can’t run that then you might as well give up now
- Download and install AviSynth 2.5.8 (try 2.5.7 if you have audio issues or mencoder crashes)
- Download this multithreaded build of AviSynth and replace avisynth.dll in either C:\windows\system32 or C:\windows\syswow64, for 32-bit or 64-bit systems respectively. Then replace the files in (progam files)\AviSynth 2.5\plugins with the ones in the zip file.
- Download VSFilter and extract it to (program files)\AviSynth 2.5\plugins
- Open Haali Media Splitter settings and set Autoload VSFilter to Yes as so:
- If you are running Windows 7, download and run Win7DSFilterTweaker, and set everything apart from MP2, MP3 and AAC to ffdshow where available. You shouldn’t need to change any other settings.
- Open ffdshow Video decoder configuration and configure it as below: (H.264 set to ffmpeg-mt)
- Set up any ffdshow filters you wish to use (DeBand is a good one) and keep Subtitles disabled as they are handled externally.
- Open ffdshow Audio decoder configuration, go to the DirectShow Control tab, click Edit next to ‘Don’t use ffdshow in’ and add mencoder.exe to the list. This prevents ffdshow from handling the audio in PS3 Media Server, since it has a tendancy to go out of sync gradually, reaching several seconds behind at some points. If you get chipmunk audio even after following step 12, either undo this step or try the opposite version of AviSynth (see step 4).
- Download and install CoreAAC, which appears to not have the chipmunk audio issue the built in Windows one suffers from, nor the sync issue with ffdshow’s AAC decoder.
- Open PS3 Media Server and configure to match the following screenshot, using your discretion where necessary.
- On the Avisynth/MEncoder settings page, make sure you have the convertfps=true option disabled, as it can lead to audio sync issues and very noticable frame skip.
At this stage, you should have everything working. Playing an anime MKV file via your PS3 should trigger at least 2 tray icons to appear: Haali Media Splitter and ffdshow video decoder. If you get an icon for ffdshow DXVA video decoder, something isn’t right. Although if you don’t care about filters and just want ordered chapters then this should be fine.
Good luck getting this setup working – it’s well worth the effort. 