out >> m_Conscientia; » ps3

Heavy Rain Demo

Alex Peck — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:35:08 +0000

This is somewhat hidden, but if you visit Precinct 52 you can obtain a code to get the demo.

Once you register, select the following pieces of evidence (for some of them, you need to drill in to get the individual items):

1. Tyre tracks (117h)
2. Short cigarette (117b)
3. Origami bird
4. Coffee shop C (“diner”)

Once submitted you get a code which you can redeem in the Playstation store (there is a little button next to your basket icon at the top which took me an embarrassingly long time to find).

I really enjoyed the sleazy place demo, despite the clunky camera. This is a classic problem: you can let the player control the camera, or provide canned control sequences which are more cinematically gratifying. Although the shots might be framed better, you blunder about like a fool. This tends to break the suspension of disbelief, and is exacerbated by an animation engine which fails to adapt well enough to recover from most blunders.

This sort of criticism is missing the point I think, and failed to put a dent in my enjoyment. Quick time events have evolved slightly since Shenmue, and I like the way button sequences physically reflect the onscreen action and are embedded in the game world.

Watching this I realised that when I played it parts of some scenes ended differently (it clearly depends which questions you ask).

Can’t play .mp4 files on PS3 via TVersity

Alex Peck — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:38:52 +0000

I got some .mp4 videos which refused to play through Tversity on my PS3 (I got the ‘the data type is not supported’ message). At first I thought the headers were corrupt, but when I opened them with HxD the corrupt files matched the one which worked.

It turned out some of the files were encoded with h.264 level 5, which appears to be incompatible with the PS3. This is relatively easy (and quick) to fix:

With Yamb split out the audio and video streams
Use H264info to convert the video to Level 4.1 (don’t touch the other options)
Recombine audio and video using Yamb (make sure you set the correct framerate for the video stream, or it will be out of sync)

Whilst Yamb seems to work extremely well, the UI suffers from appalling glitches when navigating (mainly due to button placement and having to go back and forth to split and join), so be careful not to overwrite any files if you batch convert.

For a better explanation of H264 levels see this page, and the H264info switches are described toward the bottom here.

TVersity & h.264 .mkv on PS3

Alex Peck — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 18:04:41 +0000

First, I tried following this guide. It didn’t work. I was successful with the following:

Uninstall previous TVersity, ffdshow, codecs etc
Reboot
Install Tversity, ffdshow
Install Haali Matroska Splitter
Set the TVersity service to log on using a local admin account.

I used Zoom player to verify Haali is working, then tested on the PS3. It would appear that Haali needs to run with admin privilege.

For best performance, update the PS3 profile in profiles.xml to transcode to mpeg2. At 1280×720 over a 100 base T network the default of mpeg16 saturates my bandwidth in some cases. This is the relevant part of the config file:

 audio="audio/x-wav" video="video/mpeg2" photo="image/jpeg"
                         onlineAudio="audio/mpeg" onlineVideo="video/mpeg2" onlinePhoto="image/jpeg"
                         adjustReadStartPos="false" audioFailFutureSeek="false" videoFailFutureSeek="true" />

I’m using Vista x64 with UAC disabled, your mileage may vary on other configurations.