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This post is roughly 14 years old; originally published on August 27, 2009! The information presented here may be out of date and inaccurate.
Please read this page but do keep its age in mind.
The PlayStation 3 can’t play MKV files. Therefore I’ve written a script that creates a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 compatible MPEG-4 from Matroska providing the video is H.264 and audio is AC3 or DTS.
Xbox 360 compatibility requires that audio is forcibly downmixed to stereo
with --stereo. AAC 5.1 audio will have the correct channel assignments when
transcoding from AC3 5.1 and DTS 5.1. If neroAacEnc is installed then it is
used in preference to faac for encoding the AAC audio, as it produces better
quality output. neroAacEnc is optional.
The script does as little re-encoding as possible, only the audio and
subtitles are re-encoded or converted. The script can detect profile 5.1 H.264
and patch it to 4.1 in under a second. Any subtitles in the Matroska are
preserved. If mp4creator is used the subtitles are extracted stored in a
seperate file. If MP4Box is used (default) the subtitles are converted to
GPAC Timed Text and muxed into the resulting MPEG-4. The PlayStation 3 can’t
display these subtitles but some software players can.
The script can optionally split the Matroska if it is greater than 4GB to ensure PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and FAT32 compatibility. This script works on Ubuntu and should work on any other Linux/Unix flavour and possibly Mac OS X providing you have the required tools installed.