always, always problems with the d-link dns-323, mediatomb, and the ps3. it appears that for some of the xvid AVIs that i get, the ps3 just refuses to play them. i suspect the culprit here is that whatever encoding is being used is something that the ps3 just doesn’t quite understand. the files play fine on any computer.

this problem isn’t that big of a problem, but it does creep up from time to time. it seems to be particularly problematic on older encoded files. i suspect that old versions xvid or divx aren’t backwards compatible enough, but whatever the problem is, the solution is not particularly elegant.

i tried to get ffmpeg running on the dns-323, but whenever i try to re-encode with ffmeg on the dns-323, i get errors on the encoding. if i was using a more powerful streaming server, i could re-encode on the fly, but since that isn’t an option, the only other thing to do is re-encode these files elsewhere. i know, it sucks, it’s awful, but i just can’t think of anything else.

there are plenty of free encoders out there, one that i particularly like is handbrake. it’s not very easy to batch many files, but if you have one or two, it’s great. there’s a command line version of it too, so you can use that to script it if you want. i’m thinking about making some kind of web service that will let me copy a file over somehwere, encode the video, and copy it back…

but for now, i’m just remote desktop’ing into another machine and doing it by hand. so long as you can batch the job, it doesn’t seem to be too big of a problem.