I just finished building a video server for PS3 and I am working on converting all of my DVD and Blu-ray to my HDD.
For DVD, MP4 files work great, but the PS3 can't play MKV which is what I use for my Blu-ray rips and such.
What format can I rip my Blu-ray to that will be full HD and still be playable on a PS3? I only need 2.1 audio.
Chances are the video bitstream in your MKV container is one that the MP4 container can handle as well, which would be MPEG-4 Part II or H.264 video. It depends on the tool you're using to rip the Blu-rays, but the codec will probably be H.264.
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In essence, you can copy the video, audio and subtitle bitstreams from the MKV to the MP4 container and play that on the PS3. For example with FFmpeg:
ffmpeg -i in.mkv -c copy out.mp4
The benefit is that this will take less than a second because it won't re-encode the video or audio. So you won't even lose quality in the process.
A combination of mkvtoolnix and MP4Box should give you similar results.
With that being said you could simply do your Blu-ray rips in MP4 in the future—unless there's something the MKV container gives you which MP4 doesn't, maybe with regard to subtitles. If your FFmpeg command fails due to an improper subtitle codec, use the following instead, which will re-encode subtitles:
ffmpeg -i in.mkv -c:a copy -c:v copy -c:s mov_text out.mp4
If you can jailbreak your PS3, then do that, and install the superb app called as Showtime. It's basically VLC for PS3.
The PS3 can only read MP4 container format, not your MKV files. The easiest tool to convert MKV to MP4 without losing any quality is YAMB. YAMB will not transcode the audio or video, so each movie will only take a few minutes.
Download YAMB from here
In YAMB, create MP4
Add you MKV file
Set Output name
Create
