Wicked 3sty for Something

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.

PS3 Linux Installation

Installing Linux on the PS3 was a relative no brainer. Really, I was tremendously impressed with just how much work Sony put into making the PS3 a Linux installable device. For anyone out there who has hacked and or installed Linux on their original XBox or AppleTV you'll agree with me what a sight for sore eyes an X-Windows desktop can be on your HDTV.

I'd even hazard to say that installing Linux on my PS3 was the EASIEST Linux install I have ever had ever. This from a guy who has installed Linux hundreds if not thousands of times. Why was it so easy you might ask? Two words...Wireless Support. Full fledged WiFi support. No ndiswrapper/broadcom garbage. Fully functional, use your PS3 as a sick wireless access point WiFi. That being said, getting WPA to work is a total bitch. And I use the gigabit ethernet port to connect to the rest of my home gigabit network. WPA and my own proclivities towards gigabit aside, full wireless support in Yellow Dog Linux was the main contributing factor in my choice to install YDL on the PS3.

Yellow Dog Linux a proud purveyor of a Red Hat/Fedora derived distro will probably sound pretty familiar to all those old PowerPC Apple Computer owners out there. For a long time YDL was the only game in town if you wanted to get Linux running on your Mac OR you wanted to have access to rpms compiled for the PowerPC you would buy YDL and their support. In fact the PowerPC market is still a major market that YDL develops for. As near as I can tell PS3 and PowerPC are the only markets they develop for. This of course has become somewhat more onerous since Fedora, Gentoo, and Ubuntu used to distribute PowerPC based distributions.

Based upon TerraSoft's (The company that produces YDL) expertise Sony contracted with the TerraSoft to produce a full Linux distro tailored towards the PS3's hardware. At some point near launch Sony backed away from the deal, and didn't advertise YDL as the distro of choice for Sony. It would be interesting to find out why this happened, but as near as I can tell it created a relationship between Sony and TerraSoft. It appears that TerraSoft has an open line of communication with Sony, which has facilitated the support of such things as Wireless in the most recent YDL 5.02 release.

I downloaded the Yellow Dog Distro using Terra Soft's Download Page I burned the .iso to a DVD and then printed out the TerraSoft Yellow Dog installation Guide. The guide was well written and easy to understand.

Once you have downloaded and burned the DVD, you have to transfer control of the PS3 to the Yellow Dog Linux Installer.

1. Insert YDL into the PS3
2. From the GameOS menu, select:
   Settings ==> System Settings ==> Install Other OS
3. Your PS3 will now scan the DVD for the bootloader installer and
   bootloader.
4. Confirm discovery of "/ps3/otheros/otheros.bld".
5. Press "X" on the controller to start the installation. The PS3 screen blanks
   while pulling files from the DVD.
6. You must now select "Other OS" in order to install YDL:
   Settings ==> System Settings ==> Default System ==> Other OS
7. When prompted to boot Other OS, select "Yes".

The above step appears to cause some confusion. What the above 7 steps are doing is telling your PS3 that there is another operating system on the PS3. The /ps3/otheros/otheros.bld is what is called a boot loader. It is what allows you to choose the "Other OS" option in the PS3's System Settings, and it is what boots your computer from the Yellow Dog Linux DVD in the next step.

Installing the actual Linux OS is very simple and very similar to any other Red Hat Linux derivative. You choose the Language and Keyboard, you partition the hard drive, choose a root password, and whamo you have a PS3 installing a shiny new Linux system to its hard drive. The installation process takes an hour or two, and I used this chance to go to bed.

When I awoke the next day, the PS3 was ready to be rebooted. After rebooting, the system required some basic configuration, and it then booted into a full fledged X-windows session running the E17 Enlightenment window manager.

The first problem, I encountered was that I didn't have network connectivity. I had plugged in an ethernet cable into the back of the PS3, but  according to the  Graphical Network connections utility, it said that only the Wireless network card was found. I looked around the utility and did not spot anything relating to WPA, so I fired up google.com and looked for a solution to connect to my WPA enabled wireless network. After a little bit of looking, it appeared that configuring WPA on the PS3 was quite difficult, so I decided to try to get the preferable ethernet network working. After a little bit of searching, I find the following instructions on the TerraSoft Web Site.

Switch Back to a Wired Connection
With the hyper-visor limitations and controlling which network connection is active, it is not easy to switch between wireless and wired connections and impossible to have both on line at the same time. This procedure is more technical then setting up the wireless and requires some technical knowledge of how Linux works and using the command line. If you are unsure of any steps please seek assistance from a experienced Linux user.

1. Open the Network configuration manager (Yellow Dog logo > Applications > Applications > System Tools > System Config > Network
2. Delete "Sony PS3 Ethernet Dev" under the hardware tab
3. Close the Network Configuration manager, confirm with "Yes" and then "Ok"
4. Open a Terminal window
5. Type "su -"
6. Enter the root password when prompted
7. Type "rm /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0"
8. Type "rm /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0"
9. Restart networking by typing "service network restart"
10. Type "killall dhclient"
11. Rebuild /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 from scratch if in doubt use this default (type "nano /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0" to edit the file)

    DEVICE=eth0
    BOOTPROTO=dhcp
    ONBOOT=yes

12. Push and hold "Ctrl" then push "x"
13. Push "y" to save changes to the file
14. hit Enter to confirm to save to that file name
15. Type "cp /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0"
16. Type "service network restart"

This editing of network scripts reconfigures your system to use eth0 (the main gigabit ethernet nic) instead of eth1 (the wireless nic).

After the Linux powered PS3 received an IP address, and was connected to the Internet, I then set about installing all of the most needed software for any respectable HDTV connected Linux box. Namely Mplayer and VLC. I knew that the PS3 had yum so I fired up yum and searched for VLC and mplayer. Neither were found. I knew this had to do with yum repositories. I knew that the repositories pre-installed with the system did not contain the VLC or mplayer packages. A quick Google Search resulted in the following TicTech2 article. The article suggested adding the following repositories to /etc/yum.repos.d direcotory.
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

Once done, you can now download VLC and mplayer. Both of which do a fine job playing media stored on the PS3 or connected to across the network via NAS storage. Neither can play DVDs from the PS3's DVD drive. It appears that the DVD drive is hardware locked. But I haven't been able to confirm this with anyone. I have asked this question to many YDL boards, as well as Sony PS3 boards, and no one seems to no the answer. Ill update this as soon as I hear something.

Playstation 3 + Linux = OK Linux Computer

I had been pretty psyched to hear that the PS3 could "easily" run Linux. Several months back, I ran across an article on IBM lovingly describing the PS3 as the best thing to happen to Linux since the Linux powered TiVo.

As someone who loves to be called a sucker, I bought into the hype and purchased one. The central claim about the PS3 is that it is an incredibly...INCREDIBLY powerful computer. The Cell BE processor is considered to essentially be a "super-computer". Earlier this year, Wired magazine came out with a 1 pager stating that the PS3 could reach 1.5 Teraflops, the X-Box 360 can compute at 1 Teraflop, and it would take 430 P4 PCs to be equivalent to 1 TF.

Wow 1.5 Teraflops, that is incredible. It's like having a "super-computer" in your living room. Is this true? Is the PS3 the equivalent of 645(430 x 1.5) P4 computers? I don't know. Do I care? Not really. Have I repeated the Wired article to anyone who would listen....YEAH!!!

Most of the hype regarding the PS3 as a computer centers around its use of the Cell BE processor. The Cell was a joint development venture between Sony, and IBM. It is comprised of 2 Power Processing Elements and 8 count them 8 Synergistic Processing Elements. That's a total of 10 processing cores. That's like what...5 times better than my stinky laptop with two cores? Well No...

The SPEs are only data crunchers. The PPEs are in charge of the delegation of tasks, and the keeping track of which core is doing what. It's like a bad implementation of a planned communist economy. Like communism, it is complicated, difficult to plan for, and highly inefficient  when implemented poorly. But even more like communism, the believers in the Cell BE believe it to be the better chip ideology.

I have seen interviews with Kai Staats the CEO of Yellow Dog (a PowerPC based PS3 Linux Distro) say that after reworking  application code, they are code execute 80 times faster. Wow that does sound impressive, but we also have to remember that communist Russia had a literacy rate of almost 100%. Which sounds great, but you have to remember that they essentially killed all of the dissidents (people who can't read).

Which is a round about way of saying that it's all fun and games until you buy a PS3 to do one dedicated, specific high volume processing task and you find out that the DVD drive is locked and you can't use it as a dedicated DVD ripper.