PlayStation 3 with MediaTomb on Linux and OpenBSD
I have posted a few journal entries on this subject, but this page is here to be sort of a more general overview. There is some detailed information in these posts if you are interested.
Nat Type 3
I run an OpenBSD router, and some port forwarding needs to be done to make sure that the PlayStation 3 can properly communicate with the internet. I have verified the following works for WarHawk, including voice chat, as well as the PlayStation Store, and the voice chat built into the XMB.
Allow Outbound (only necessary in some cases with extremely restrictive firewall rulesets)
TCP: 80, 443, 5223 and UDP: 3478, 3479.
Port Forward inbound
TCP: 9293 and UDP: 3658
TCP/9293 is the port for Remote Play, and 3658 is for other users to connect to you. If you do not forward 3658 you will get the dreaded NAT Type 3.
Media sharing with MediaTomb
Since MediaTomb is the only Linux UPnP media server that I have found that can do transcoding I have been using it for some time now. It is highly configurable and fairly stable. I tend to track the SVN version fairly closely, but now that 0.11.0 is out the transcoding features are available to anyone. Most of the new transcoding features are really well documented on the MediaTomb site, so I won’t reproduce my entire config here, but my transcoding stuff looks like:
<transcoding enabled="yes">
<mimetype-profile-mappings>
<transcode mimetype="video/quicktime" using="vlc-sh"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/x-matroska" using="vlc-sh"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/mp2p" using="ffmpeg-sh"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/ogg" using="ffmpeg-sh"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/mp4" using="ffmpeg-sh"/>
<transcode mimetype="video/avi" using="ffmpeg-avi"/>
</mimetype-profile-mappings>
<profiles>
<profile name="ffmpeg-sh" enabled="yes" type="external">
<mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
<accept-url>no</accept>
<first-resource>yes</first>
<agent command="/staff/mernisse/bin/ffmpeg-tr" arguments="%in %out"/>
<buffer size="6144000" chunk-size="131072" fill-size="2048000"/>
</agent></profile>
<profile name="ffmpeg-avi" enabled="yes" type="external">
<mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
<accept -url>no</accept>
<first-resource>yes</first>
<agent command="/staff/mernisse/bin/ffmpeg-tr" arguments="%in %out"/>
<buffer size="6144000" chunk-size="131072" fill-size="2048000"/>
<avi-fourcc-list mode="ignore">
<fourcc>XVID</fourcc>
<fourcc>DIVX</fourcc>
<fourcc>DX50</fourcc>
<fourcc>WVC1</fourcc>
</avi>
</agent></profile>
<profile name="vlc-sh" enabled="yes" type="external">
<mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
<accept-url>yes</accept>
<first-resource>yes</first>
<agent command="/staff/mernisse/bin/vlc-tr" arguments="%in %out"/>
<buffer size="6144000" chunk-size="131072" fill-size="2048000"/>
</profile>
</profiles>
</transcoding>
Some notes about that config:
- I transcode MP4 – You may not have to if your MP4 files are all playable on the PS3, I would try it out without first and then transcode if necessary. I have more files that don’t work than files that do.
- Audio transcoding doesn’t work right now on the PS3 – A number of weird things that the PS3 does is keeping this from working, hopefully the MediaTomb guys will nail it and make it work, it sounds like the on the horizon ‘built in transcoding’ might fix this issue, but that is still a bit off.
Life, movies and games
So I’m officially 26 now, and I figure that’s a good reason to update anyone who actually reads this on a few things. First of all, I’m on chapter 4 of Heavenly Sword. The game is still awesome though I’m afraid it’ll be over soon. There’s some really fun and challenging missions with Kai (the funny cat-girl looking character) at the end of chapter 3, and the boss fights keep getting more involved. It’s defiantly not just a button masher. I’ve cooled off on the Warhawk lately, but it’s still a ton of fun to pickup and spend a few hours blowing people up. I’m totally into the dogfight aspect. I should probably play some ground battles more but it’s just not as fun as the expansive open chaos of the dogfight. In other PS3 news I’m currently testing the development transcoding stuff in mediatomb. It works pretty well, considering the age of apollo (the server that is running this thing) and the fact that it’s an external transcoder so seek/pause doesn’t work. It pretty much makes my dream of having just the PS3 and my stereo hooked up at the new house a reality. I just have to get mencoder working so I can watch quicktime movies.
I finished cleaning out the rack the other day, it’s so empty now… but I’m also only using 66% of the one UPS now, so that’s a 33% decrease in electricity usage which I can totally get behind. It also frees up the other UPS to move upstairs to protect the WAP and switch in the den. Since my workstations are both laptops that means I can survive a short power outage unscathed. Hooray.
In other news, I’m waiting to hear about my car which remains at the dealership being worked on and the approval paperwork for the new place is still in limbo so hopefully I’ll start hearing soon and we can begin moving on to the next stage.
Notable birthday events: Had dinner with mom and the family, was nice if not hectic as usual :) Had wine with Nina, was a nice quiet way to end the day. Generally laid around and relaxed.
Heavenly Sword
This has been one of the most anticipated titles coming up for the PS3 for me. It’s been fairly highly accoladed by the swath of gamer sites out there and even Sony is jumping up and down about it. Most of the game websites will all tell you about the game, it’s a combo based action game much like God of War featuring a gorgeously rendered female lead “Nariko” voiced by Anna Torv (imdb), who really helps to bring this character to life. The game itself was done in England by developer Ninja Theory (wikipedia) but was directed by Andy Serkis of “Gollum” fame. Standing opposite of Nariko is the evil King Bohan, who is voiced and mocapped by Andy Serkis as well and all the power he put into his performance of Gollum on the big screen for the Lord of the Rings trillogy come dripping through in this perverse corrupt king. As I sit down to write this I am just starting chapter three of the game but already I find myself liking Nariko a lot more than I thought I would. The character was in mortal danger after playing the demo earlier last month of being too driven, too coarse, not human enough, not likable but as the story has progressed between the making of featurettes that Sony has had in the Playstation store and website over the last month and the actual gameplay one finds themselves really pulling for this character, she has a soft female side that works very well and she carries a GIGANTIC DEIFIED SWORD.
I don’t know how anyone, anywhere can argue with that.
All the other things that the reviews have said are true. The audio is amazing. 5.1 motion picture quality score, professional Foley effects, awesome voice actors, and of course spectacular graphics. I was worried the skin textures would look like Oblivion, where everyone looked like they had shit on their faces, but the skin tones and textures are quite good and I am perpetually amazed in the quality of the PS3 video output. Not to sound like a fan boy but this has to be the prettiest game for any next generation console, hands down.
Warhawk
So I grabbed Warhawk today after work and after taking a quick nap to recover from a splitting headache I played for like 2 hours. I must say the game is exactly what most of the reviews have said, it’s a true blue shooter, the team dogfight is awesome, with like 32 players causing total chaos and blowing the crap out of each other. I’m by no means a game reviewer, but I am plenty amused by the whole situation and I usually hate online games.
More Playstation 3 noise
I have been reading game sites now that I have settled into the Playstation 3 and am anticipating a whole bunch of games coming up.
I’m almost through with Resistance: Fall of Man — it’s pretty fun for a FPS, which I generally don’t like at all. I am constantly amazed by the capability of these new systems.
I am still waiting for a release of the MediaTomb software with transcoding, but mp3s and videos that have been pre-transcoded for the PS3 work perfectly, I just wish you could copy media FROM the PS3 TO the DLNA media server. It would be nice to get these huge videos I’ve downloaded from the Playstation Store off the PS3 onto the network, though the 60GB hard drive is seeming plenty big thus far.
On top of that Blu-Ray looks amazing both on my 20.1″ LCD and on my room mate’s 51″ projection CRT, the DVD upscaling is pretty fantastic, I just got finished watching the movie Children of Men on DVD and it looked really fantastic.
The 1080i TV is nice, but I have my eye on a Samsung 40″ 1080p FullHD LCD (LNT4065F) for when I move out at the end of the year, I’ll have to replace the front speakers in my surround setup at some point, they just don’t have the punch to do this stuff justice anymore (Polk R150′s look neat) .
The damn World of Warcraft
The damn thing keep sucking me back in. I checked up on Cedega and noticed they released version 6.0 which is supposed to include Shader 2.0 support and other optimizations that should result in better performance. So somehow this lead me down the rabbit hole of playing WoW again.
My original writeup on my setup is here http://www.ub3rgeek.net/wp/?p=38, so I will only detail the stuff that has changed.
- World of Warcraft Client 2.0.12 en-US
- Cedega 6.0
- Dropline Gnome 2.16.3
- nVidia driver 1.0-9755
Edit: I am testing out Wine 0.9.34 which looks promising, what with GLSL and other such things.
I am dinking with the registry settings to eek the most performance out of it, but at first glance it is a strong contender with Cedega at least in the World of Warcraft camp.
(http://wiki.winehq.org/UsefulRegistryKeys)
World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade
Since I’ve noticed alot of hits from google for Burning Crusade I think I should probably show off / explain some stuff. First and foremost my laptop is a Lenovo 3000 N100 which equates to:
Hardware
- Intel Core Duo T2500 2GHz
- 1.5GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
- 100GB 5400 RPM SATA Hard drive
- nVidia GeForce 7300 GO 128MB integrated video with Turbo Cache (PCI Express x16)
- 15″ Widescreen (16:10) LCD, 1680×1050 Native
Software
- Slackware 11.0
- Dropline Gnome 2.16.2
- Kernel 2.6.19.1
- nVidia Binary Driver 1.0-9746
- Cedega 5.2.3, Engine 5.2.9
- World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade 2.0.5 Build 6320 (Release)
Prior to Burning Crusade I got about 30-45 FPS indoors and 15 FPS outdoors while playing with this Config.wtf. Now with Burning Crusade the performance has not really changed at all.
My Cedega settings are here:
General
Video
System Info
Screenshots of the results of course are available in the gallery.
Errata
Two things to look out for:
- If you have the Collector’s Edition DVD, there is no visible installer on it. Copy the Installer.exe and from the first CD and use that to install.
- Most likely the patches will not run under Cedega, I used Wine 0.9.24 to run the patches. The installer was run through Cedega without issue.
It BURNS us PRECIOUS!!!
The wait was worth it, the lack of sleep will be worth it. We infact were successful in procuring two copies of the World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Collectors’ Edition expansion. We got home just before 12:20 after waiting in line at GameStop for about 2 hours. The line was out the door when we left and they had precious few collectors editions but I got mine! The other is for the ex, so don’t ask! :)
Off to zone into Outland folks! And then…maybe sleep…. maybe.
(Edit: 1:20 AM EST)
Wow… Experience again… Crazy stuff.
Tons of screenshots in the gallery (clicky the thumbnail above to be taken there). It is totally awesome stuff! The Netherwelp is so neat looking and the particle effect trail!! Amazingly the servers stayed up and I could run around Hellfire!! Go Blizzard go!
I have an early meeting so I should be going to bed I suppose……….