This weekend, I took our tax refund money, went out and bought a Playstation 3. Not the crazy gagillion gigabyte version with the lousy software backwards compatibility, just the 40 gig model. I've got a PS2 to play PS2 games, thank you very much. I spent most of Saturday night hooking things up. I signed up with an online name, so if you've got a PS3 feel free to add King Boss Hell as a friend. Actually, I think they disallow spaces, so it might be KingBossHell. That was a name my friend Mark came up with years ago while playing Car Wars. King Boss Hell led a motorcycle gang. I've got a very vivid image of the hairy, leather-clad brute.
I notice that the PS3 has a lot of home media center functionality. And while I've finally managed to get Tivo Desktop working quite nicely, the PS3 has the potential to do certain things better. Linda and I are about 4 episodes into season 2 of Dexter, which I've got to say is one of the best written TV shows out there. If you haven't seen it, you need to. The problem is that in order to watch Dexter through our Tivo, I had to transcode the avi files into mpeg files. I tried some freeware called ffmpeg or something, but it didn't work well. After trying a bunch of software, I discovered winmpg video convert, which seemed to work. The only problem was the big "THIS IS A DEMO VERSION" graphic in the center of all converted videos. Once it seemed to work, I dropped 30 bucks. I figured that if the=is let me watch all my pc videos on the TV, it was worth it. But after watching episode 1 of Dexter season 2, I found that the audio went out of sync after 15 minutes or so. So I wrote the following email to the software support folks.
I just purchased winmpg video convert this weekend, and I'm having some trouble. Every AVI file I convert from avi to mpeg format has this problem. At the beginning of the converted mpeg, the video and audio begin in sync, but as the movie progresses, they go out of sync - you hear peoples' voices after their image has already spoken. Is there a setting I can tweak to alleviate this problem?
My video is approximately 45 minutes long.
A day or two later, I received this response:
hi,
Thanks for your feedback!
I must apologize for the problem as you said was existed.
We will fix the bug in the next version, then we will contact with you.
Thanks!
--
Thanks!
susan
Nice. To me, that says "Sorry, sucks to be you. Maybe our next version won't suck as much. If we ever have a next version. By the way, I don't speak English well."
Luckily, I was chatting with Frank about this, and he recommended Videora, which works fantastically. And it's free. So we've watched the next few Dexter episodes on our TV, they look good, and the audio is in sync. Thanks, Frank.
It looks like if I can figure out how to set up the PS3 similarly to the Tivo, I can transfer avi, mp4, and other file formats as well as mpeg. We'll have to see how that goes. As of right now, I still haven't even played a game yet on the PS3. We downloaded a couple movie trailers though - you should see the trailer for Hancock. It looks hilarious. Will Smith is a kind of hobo superhero.
We also watched Battlestar Galactica: Razor last night on the PS3, which upscales regular DVD movies fairly well. I recommend Razor if only because it includes the old Cylons. It was damn cool to see three of them sitting in one of those old Cylon ships, saying "BY YOUR COMMAND" in that old Cylon voice. The fourth and final season of Battlestar Galactica starts this Friday, and I'm hoping that it doesn't start to feel like Lost.
As a final note, an anecdote from last night. I paused the movie at one point when Starbuck said "I love it when a plan comes together." I told Linda how Hannibal from the A-Team always used to say that, and how the Dirk Benedict who played Face on the A-Team also played Starbuck on the original Battlestar Galactica. Neat reference. Her response? She called me a geek.