PS3 + Linux + 360 HD-DVD Drive = Golden Ticket!!

Author's Edit:

After reading several peoples comments, I think I need to make a couple things clear.

The PS3 is a 100 + GFLOPS  Linux computer. You simply can't get that type of power for the $500.00 price point. Using the PS3's cell processor for video encoding is an excellent use of the cell chip. I personally don't think it is an inelegant solution. And it interfaces well with my needs i.e. home theater, NAS media repository, personal work flow... Several people have commented that purchasing a low cost PC or Mac would be a better solution. I disagree, a low cost Mac or PC has no where near the computational power of the PS3 at the same price point.

And secondly using your XBox 360 drive in a PS3 is an ironic solution. It is supposed to be weird and kind of funny. A lot of people are getting pretty negative about it. While the solution works, the blog article was meant to be tongue in cheek. And I decided to go with this solution, because I already owned the HD-DVD drive.

There is a poster in the blog comments who says that they have gotten DVD playback working under Gentoo. I am using Yellow Dog, and based upon my Yellow Dog research, I was unable to find any solutions to the DVD playback problem under Yellow Dog 5.0.2. The HD-DVD drive was a solution to the DVD Movie playback problem I was having under Yellow Dog. The distro with the strongest relationship with Sony, which I consider to be an advantage. This was meant to be a solution for the Yellow Dog install base. For those of you running Gentoo, congratulations... but it is not relevant to my situation.

Original Posting:

I've got a golden ticket, and it is a wicked fast DVD ripping machine. Oh yeah, it also plays blue-ray movies and   some pretty crappy Next Gen video games.

You can install Linux onto a PS3, but it is pretty hobbled. First of all, you don't get full access to the sick graphics capabilities, and secondly you can't watch DVD movies from within the Linux OS. WTF, why would you ever want to have a Linux media box hooked up to your HDTV, and not watch DVDs?!?

Not being able to watch DVDs was a deal breaker for me. I bought the PS3 to be my dedicated DVD ripper. I have become sick and tired of waiting around 16 hours for my wimpy PowerPC Mac to finish ripping and encoding a DVD. Damn it, I want real time H.264 DVD encoding, and I don't want to pay a lot for it.

So imagine my chagrin after I plunked down $500.00, brought the PS3 home and installed Linux and wham...No DVD movie access. You can mount a DVD movie, but you can't read a VOBs. This appears to be more of the PS3 hypervisor's handiwork. Trying to play a DVD with Mplayer would result in an error saying that "libdvdcss can't decrypt the key". I searched high and low, and no one knew what the problem was. Some people thought that it was a DVD licensing problem, or that the PS3's blue-ray DVD player was region locked or possibly even region free.

Bah humbug I say...The drive is locked. Not having a license or region issues would not explain the inability to read and/or copy only the VOB files off the DVD disk. You could copy any of the IFO files as easily as can be, but as soon as you tried copying a VOB file, you were stuck. The cp command errors out stating that the file can't be read. WTF indeed.

Like I said earlier, this was a deal breaker for me. If the PS3 can't read DVD movies FAHHGETABOUTIT.  Ill take my $500 and invest in a Mac Mini ripper.

Well luckily I tried plugging in my XBox 360 HD-DVD Drive. Upon rebooting the PS3, the XBox 360 drive came up as the first SCSI drive /dev/scd0 and /dev/dvd was linked to it. The Blueray PS3 drive came up as /dev/scd1 and was linked to /dev/dvd-sr1. It's kind of funny that the EXTERNAL XBox 360 drive is being prioritized  over the INTERNAL PS3 Blueray drive, and I take it as evidence that even the Linux kernel running on the PS3 knows that the Blueray drive is a second class citizen.

Oh by the way, I believe you can  rip  HD-DVD content off of the HD-DVD drive. You just can't do anything with it. As far as I know, there are no Linux movie players that can read and play the HD-DVD codecs. Even if there were, you would never be able to play/watch the HD content because of the PS3's hobbled video card. Perhaps if the video card ever becomes emancipated, this could be revisited. 

Aftermath:
I am now able to rip with the best of them. I compiled handbrake from source, and I am now able to RIP all my DVDs and encode them in H.264 in near real time. I am officially very happy!!!

I would recommend the PS3 + Linux + 360 HD-DVD Drive ripping solution for anyone who already owns a XBox 360 and would use the HD-DVD drive with that. Otherwise the solution will cost you an extra $170 for the HD-DVD drive, and at that price point I am not sure if it is worth it. $500 was my price point for a VERY fast DVD ripper, but I probably wouldn't go much higher.

Comments

[Joey Joe Joe jr.]

lol nerd

[Quagmire]

You are a second class blogger

[NJ]

Could've been a good read, but your constant bashing and MS love relationship got in the way.

[plastek]

You sir are an idiot. How about you learn to use the OS before you bash it. I had no problems getting DVD playback on Gentoo via libdvdcss, and mplayer, but then again I'm not a moron.

[RuddigerPez]

It seems like you were upset about two things... One: that you couldn't play DVDs using Linux on your PS3. Two: that you couldn't rip DVD movies using the same setup. In response to your #1 complaint: If you want to play movies...just use the PS3 OS to do it...it upscales nicely. Idiot. In response to #2: If you want to rip DVDs, you could have built a PC with a few DVD burners, installed any Linux distro you wanted...and found the hacks you would have needed to easily rip DVDs easily for around $500. The fact that you bought a PS3 just for this purpose and are pissed that it didn't do what you wanted showed you didn't know all the options available to begin with. I typically do research before droppin $500 on something...

[Dixons Manager]

Do you work at Dixons?

[Qmmm]

For $500 you could build a computer to dedicate to that. Sony's selling it as a Blu-ray player, not a DVD ripper. Good work Einstein.

[Majik]

You know for the same money you spent on this project you could have bought a PC that would rip DVDs exponentially faster than your Power PC Mac.

Oh, and nice tie.

[John John John]

Hello Non Morons,
For those of you who skipped high school English class. Playing DVDs on your PS3 through the XBox 360 drive is ironic. It's funny, get over loser selves.

Plextor you said that you have DVD playback working? You are officially the first. You must be the best non-moron PS3 Linux user in the world. It must be all your excellent portage source code skills.

[Monkeynator]

Ahem, for all the haters out there, remember that this is YDL that is distributed with the PS3. This is not Gentoo and you can't say that having to convert to Gentoo just to play DVD's is not a hassle. If Sony gives the PS3 Linux support via YDL then you would expect certain standard Linux capable items. Disabling the Blu-Ray drive makes the YDL cripple ware, and doesn't make sense if you can just plug in an external USB drive.

I bet half of you don't even know what "PC" stands for. Linux is famous for being a PITA to setup for items we take for granted on other systems, and snobby elitist Linux users don't make it any easier. A real Linux power user would point him to the resources needed to get the player to work in YDL.

In any case, congratulations on getting Handbrake to work. It would be nice if step by step instructions were posted. Also, did you use the compiler with CELL support?

[Zhang]

@john john john

He is not officially the first. Gentoo has no problems playing/ripping dvds on the ps3. Fedora has no problems either. In fact i had never heard of this obviously glaring issue so i ran a google search and the only result i found related to it was a single post on the PS forums, which looks like it was posted by this same author. If this is really an issue then it appears to be specific to YDL.

However, since this is the only case i can find of someone having this issue, and all the other forums i see are talking about breaking the encryption on blu-ray discs so they can be ripped to the HDD and played, forgive me if i am skeptical.

Also if you are going to flame people with "get over loser selves" don't start off with "for those of you who skipped high school english class"

[Tom]

Hello All,
I updated the posting with a clarification that this was indeed happening to me under Yellow Dog and Gentoo users do are able to initiate DVD playback.

Monkeynator, Ill post a Handbrake tutorial. But the steps are:
1) Install jam nasm and if you don't already have it installed libdvdcss2
You can do this with yum: sudo yum install jam nasm libdvdcss2
(Make sure to have better yum repositories.)
a. ydl-extras.repo
[ydl-extras]
name=YDL Extras
baseurl=file:///media/CDROM/
gpgcheck=0
enabled=0

b. Fedora-Extras.repo
[fedora-extras]
name=Fedora Extras
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/5/ppc
gpgcheck=0
enabled=0

c. livna.repo
[livna-stable]
name=Livna.org Fedora Compatible Packages (stable)
baseurl=http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/5/ppc
gpgcheck=0
enabled=0

d. freshrpms.repo
[freshrpms]
name=FreshRPMs
baseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/linux/5/ppc/freshrpms/
mirrorlist=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/linux/5/mirrors-freshrpms
enabled=1
#gpgcheck=1

Download the Handbrake source code: wget -c http://download.m0k.org/handbrake/HandBrake-0.9.1.tar.gz

Un tar and unzip the tar.gz file.
tar xvfz HandBrake-0.9.1.tar.gz

cd HandBrake directory.

Run ./configure and sudo jam

After the jam finishes making the file, you get an executable called HandBrakeCLI, I moved this to /usr/bin
and changed the file name to handbrake.

Ill post a detailed how to ASAP.

[repdetect2]

Thanks for the info Tom, a how to would be great for those noobs among us. Again, many thanks...

[Ryan]

Congrats!

I too was thinking that this would be a perfect way to utilize processor power of the PS3 instead of doing folding at home during the night. After weeks of searching I found your blog.
I would suppose that you rip using your HD-DVD drive and that you save that rip to an external drive. From there you can boot into the XMB and view the rip.

Gentoo was mentioned in one of the sane comments... I have been doing more research into the ubuntu distro http://psubuntu.com/ . Although not getting the official Sony blessing it seems to be working a bit ahead of YDL for the home user. Info in the forums and site for getting classic consoles (n64, snes games) as well as Blue Ray support. If you are looking for a challenge, how bouts ripping a blue ray disk. For me it is a toss up between the two distros.

I guess there are some of us out there who are looking towards the PS3 as more of an entertainment hub than just a gaming machine. Are you running the ps3 through a TV, if so 720p or 1080p? Keep these posts rolling, I am enjoying the read.

[Dave]

Can you use the PS3 to rip HD-DVDs to .iso files using the 360 HD-DVD player?

This should be as simple as dd if=/dev/dvd of=/home/SomeMovie.iso

If that works, this would be a cheap way to back up HD-DVDs that could be played on a media player (after they are decrypted).

[ec]

can you rip using the ps3 drive if you use ubuntu?

[Andy]

When you say "wicked fast DVD ripping machine," can you quantify that? I'm only getting around 5-7 fps, which doesn't seem wicked fast to me.