I would like to archive all my AVCHD files on an external hard drive and play them a TV without burning them to a DVD or Blu ray first. Based on my preliminary research, I am leaning towards a PS3 because of the aditional gaming caability, but really palying the video is my proprity first and foremost. I have searched the Internet on this subject, and I confirmed PS3 will play these files. However, I can not find a confirmation anywhere that it will play the files continuously as one movie (without any noticeable delay between two files) and that it will read each folder as a separate library. The footage is 1080p and been shot on a Canon HSF100. I would play it either via a wired network, or by hooking up an external USB drive directly to the PS3. Has anyone done this before and is it a good setup? How is browsing, are you limited to browsing by folder, or can you browse by date taken?

Also, any experience with any other devices that support AVCHD, such as network-connected blu-ray players or streaming boxes such as WD TV live?


[Edited on December 1, 2010 at 10:34 AM. Reason : .]

12/1/2010 10:32:43 AM

I have like 4 of the WDTV boxes (non live edition). They work awesome with stock and with 3rd party firmware. Plus they're on sale for like $40. Not 100% on your particular AVCHD; I always reencode anything I want to watch to h.264 - mainly because we'll run all 4 on the network at the same time and it saves on bandwidth. Our 10/100 network is not meant for all we put it through. (with 3rd party firmware you can use USB wifi and wired cards - I should have mentioned that.)

I'm currently jonesing for a Roku HD or XD. They're much more capable than the WD's in terms of having netflix and hulu plus; but PS3 has those or is getting them soon.

I guess it comes down to are you wanting to spend $300 or $60 to get this done?

12/1/2010 10:51:44 AM

When WD TV live sees a folder with bunch of clips in it, can you play the entire folder as one long continuous movie? What I do not want to do is to sit there and have to stop and click play for again for every single 2 or 3 second clip. Also, some of the media players will have a slight delay between two files on a playlist. Even a split-second delay is noticeable when the actual movie clips from the camera are just a few seconds long. I want the box to play it the same way my camera does, continously and without interruption, and that is what i have trouble confirming.

12/1/2010 10:59:09 AM

The PS3 has an option called sequential playback or something like that in the settings. It will play videos sequentially and I never noticed a pause but I didn't have short clips or files of this type.

12/1/2010 11:30:50 AM

^^^ it will play sequentially, but not seamlessly. Nowhere near enough horsepower in that little box for that. And clips less than 6-10 seconds will cause it's buffer algorithm to freak out.

http://www.imtoo.com/mpeg-encoder.html

I would use that to join clips then play back.

Or VDubMod and direct stream copy - that would make it free and blazing fast.

12/1/2010 12:25:06 PM

The whole point is to keep the video native. It would be really convenient to keep the entire video library on one hard drive that I can take anywhere and that is easy to back up. 1tb pocket hard drives are under a hundred dollars now and will fit all the HD footage I have right now with room to spare. However, keeping it in the native format means i can always burn them on an optical drive to share with the family and friends to play one a blue ray player. The format is supported by most blu ray players, so one of my options is to burn AVCHD dvds (limited to about 20 mins), or buy a blu ray burner and burn all these files to blu ray disks for distribution.

12/1/2010 12:46:36 PM

^the problem is doing everything seamlessly. Calculating any kind of fade or transition will require enough hardware to decode 2 streams simultaneously while also generating the fade or whatever transition you want. Not easy to do,

And if you put them on disk they won't play seamlessly; and you'll have no advantage of playing them off the network.

12/1/2010 2:07:29 PM

If the box has a hardware AVCHD decorder, it should not matter how short the segments are and how many of them there is, as encoding would be real-time and access time to the data would be the limiting factor. Good example of that are DVD and Blu rays players, which can acess almost any sector of the disk almost instantly without creating a pause in the image (Although I am sure that there is SOME internal memory buffer). No reason that can not be done with a hard-drive based video, especially if the box knows the playlist and can buffer the next file.

I am thinking about taking my hard drive to Game Stop or BB and asking them to hook it up to a PS3 so i could try it out.

Still taking suggestions on any other hardware you have experience with.

12/1/2010 2:20:56 PM

the transition you would want is to seemlessly transition. The buffer always contains X bytes until you get to the end of a file. If theres only 1 file for the video the buffer empties as the last bytes are played off. If there are two files, once its read the last X bytes of file 1 into the buffer it starts reading bytes from file 2.

As far as the decoder cares it only knows about however many bytes it can handle at a time. Its up to the application using the decoder to supply the bytes from one or more files in proper order for continuous playback.

Its very simple to do with no apparent transition but programmers are lazy.

[Edited on December 1, 2010 at 2:22 PM. Reason : .]

12/1/2010 2:22:14 PM

Quote :

"Calculating any kind of fade or transition will require enough hardware to decode 2 streams simultaneously while also generating the fade or whatever transition you want"

Sorry if I misguided some people by saying "seamless transition". I do not want a fade or swipe or any kind of other "transition effect" that would require overlapping of two video streams at the same time, I just want a clean cut from one clip to the other with no visible pause in between. To a naked eye that looks like a continuation of the same "episode." So there is always only one active stream, but the second clip should load immidiately after the first.

I think Shaggy got the right idea.

12/1/2010 4:03:33 PM