On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 00:01 -0600, Rajko M. wrote:

On Sunday 04 January 2009 06:01:26 am Roger Oberholtzer wrote:

...

Hello

Is there a mailing list for people using openSUSE on Playstation 3 boxes? I did not see reference to it on the openSUSE PS3 web page. If there is no such list, are there any folk on this list doing this? I have a few questions...

It seems there is. http://en.opensuse.org/PS3

This is the web page I mentioned. Makes no mention of a mailing list. I have indeed been to the forum. I am partial to mailing lists if they are active. They seem, somehow, more direct. Anyway, my interest is in getting media access (e.g., MP3 MPEG DIVX) working via openSUSE. You may ask why on a playstation that already does media? Well, with the PS3 software it seems to be a hit-or-miss affair. You can hook up media and it will look for things. But you have no control over what it looks for on the media. If it does not like something, it simply does not show it. For example, it shows no MP3s. Only the folders show up. I claims there is nothing in them. But of course they contain MP3s. Similar with videos. The only video it will show is one I encoded myself from video tape. So, I think the PS3 is not showing any content it thinks is copyrighted. Even if is is fully legal. Thus my interest in openSUSE as an alternative. I think the openSUSE PPC/PS3 install is quite well done. And surprisingly complete. Except for media players. There is a restricted media page at openSUSE that has a 1-click to add lots of these things. But the install fails as all the packages do not exist for PPC. Or at least they do not exist where the x86 packages are. Has anyone installed on PPC/PS3 the Fluendo software (the stuff you buy) to access various video and audio formats? At 26 Euros it is reasonable - if it will play my content... So far, I have installed RealPlayer (from 2005!) to get MP3 playback. A more current Helix does not play MP3- It even tells you to install RealPlayer if you want to listen to MP3 audio. -- Roger Oberholtzer -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 11:47 +0100, Anders Johansson wrote:

On Monday 05 January 2009 11:36:43 Roger Oberholtzer wrote:

...

So, I think the PS3 is not showing any content it thinks is copyrighted. Even if is is fully legal.

No, I don't think this is true. In my experience however, the PS3 is incredibly picky when it comes to codecs. It can only handle a very limited subset. It has caused me no end of headaches for my movie library (I have ripped my DVDs to avis for easier access)

Very possible. Part of the frustration is that it does not tell why it does not show something. It simply ignores it. It could be something as innocent as a space or a dash in a file name. Who knows?

...

Thus my interest in openSUSE as an alternative.

I think it will be difficult. SUSE in general runs well, and for music you should be fine, but for movies, linux won't get full access to the graphics hardware, so there will be performance issues. I don't think you can comfortably watch movies there.

In fact my first preference is in using the PS3 to do this. I am really only looking for an alternative as it seems to be less than cooperative.

I have heard rumours that a way has been found of gaining access to the gfx from linux, but I don't know the details.

I would have thought that the ps3fb driver for X would allow this. I do not know if it allows memory mapping of the video memory. Or if that would even be enough. I am interested in CCIT (i.e., standard broadcast) resolution, not any of the various HD formats.

I suspect the main offender is w32codecs. You should be able to modify the package selection from the 1-click installer, to remove it.

What I see happening is many packages (from Packman) failing because of a missing libiso9660.so.5 (libxine1-codecs complains) or libdc1394.so.22 (ffmpeg complains). I am now tracking these down. Roger -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Jan 6, 2009, at 4:24 AM, Jonathan Ervine wrote:

Would tend to agree with this. Having installed Linux on my PS3 I was, to say the least, underwhelmed. The PS3 doesn't have a massive amount of memory available, and has limited the accessibility to the hardware (graphics in particular). Would make for a nice server I guess.

The small amount of memory surprised me as well. I guess it is not needed. However, I have heard rumblings that gamers think the poor texture rendering (in their opinion - I don't have an opinion on this) on the PS3 is because of too little RAM. I guess I will need to see why it is totally ignoring my videos. I think they are mainly DivX and Xvid. It would be nice if one could just browse the USB storage contents to see what the PS3 thinks is there, eliminating any non-video issues. What format is your USB storage when used with the PS3? I guess we are heading off topic here... -- Roger Oberholtzer OPQ Systems / Ramböll RST Ramböll Sverige AB Kapellgränd 7 P.O. Box 4205 SE-102 65 Stockholm, Sweden Office: Int +46 8-615 60 20 Mobile: Int +46 70-815 1696 And remember: It is RSofT and there is always something under construction. It is like talking about large city with all constructions finished. Not impossible, but very unlikely. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Tuesday 06 January 2009 04:24:21 Jonathan Ervine wrote:

I think it supports WMV, DivX, and possibly other video codecs, but the range is very limited.

Unfortunately, neither xvid nor divx is one single codec, there are several different variations you can set when encoding, and the PS3 can only handle a subset of those variations. So just because a file is divx or xvid, you still can't be sure it will play. I still don't know exactly what it can handle, I just know I had to do some extensive fiddling with the enoding parameters before I managed to get it to play. Its "native" format is MP4, I think. I haven't tried too much with that though

Would tend to agree with this. Having installed Linux on my PS3 I was, to say the least, underwhelmed. The PS3 doesn't have a massive amount of memory available, and has limited the accessibility to the hardware (graphics in particular). Would make for a nice server I guess.

For CPU bound activities, it is a very nice machine Anders -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 9:53 PM, Jonathan Ervine wrote:

Very true - I have a few files that are identified as DivX encoded that don't play. Running them through a transcoder can get them to play - accepting that there will be a further loss of quality. It's all a bit hit and miss with video encoding it seems - sadly.

The mailing list for the PS3 would be the PPC mailing list, since the Cell is basically a PPC chip with 8 streaming processors strapped on(and 1 is disabled by default, but only so it can serve as a backup in case one of the others were to fail. It's supposed to be hot swapped in from what I have read).

I've got a few 'mp4' labelled files that are listed as MPEG-4 encoded by various utilities. I've found these to be as hit and miss as my xvid/DivX files. Admittedly, I have a much smaller sample of mp4 compared to divx, I've actualyl found mp4 to be even more picky about playing.

You should be able to install MPlayer from the Packman repo or just compile it(my recommendation). It will handle any format you throw at it. VLC is a good alternative as well.

I suspect you could get equivalent performance from x86 hardware though at a similar cost? As far as I remember reading one of the cores is completely unavailable as it is solely for Sony to use to run the PS3 and as a security feature. It's a nice to do thing, but I ultimately found it a bit of waste of time ... after all I couldn't play Call of Duty or FIFA etc. whilst in Linux

Yes, but if you could make use of the streaming engines for stuff like video re-encoding, then it would be amazing. However, since I don't have one, I can't say if that is possible. What do you get when you run: cat /proc/cpuinfo As for the RAM issue, they have been able to make use of the video RAM as swap or something like that, and that makes a big difference from what I have heard. I've been debating picking one up, but it's a big out of my budget right now. And, the PS2, which can also run Linux, only has 32MB RAM. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Fri, 2009-01-16 at 19:12 -0600, John Lange wrote:

[.. snip general comments about Linux on the PS3 ..]

I've been playing with Linux on the PS3 for some time and I think I can echo the general comments in this thread... It's pretty underwhelming.

Agreed. I do not think it is an openSUSE issue so much as a PS3 memory issue. I guess openSUSE could offer some defaults that makes things better. But I think the choice of window manager is the main thing. And you can select a different one easily in install or at login. It worked for me.

OpenSUSE 11.1 actually installs quite nicely on it with only the following problems:

- It's very slow. The OpenSUSE gnome desktop is BLOATED and doesn't even come close to fitting in RAM. This means you hit swap _constantly_ and with the PS3's lack-luster hard drive it's dog slow. Specifically things like beagle run on first boot and make it completely unusable.

I used fvwm instead. Speed is quite ok then. But Gnome or KDE are really out of the question.

- For some reason, OpenSUSE 11.1 defaulted to using the PS3 Wifi adapter instead of the on-board NIC. Easily fixed in Yast but strange.

Not so strange. I want to use the WiFi, not the NIC, So I was happy with this.

- The PS3 does not have the new ps3vram device which allows the system to make use of the unused RAM from the video device. Apparently using this for swap makes the system much better but I have not been able to test it yet.

I knew about this driver, but I also did not get to the point of testing it. If you do so, please post your findings.

- Almost none of the OpenSUSE repositories seem to support PPC. So if your intended use is MPlayer, or sldmame (arcade emulator) you're forced to compile everything from source but even then your likely to be missing things you need. And compiling from source is painfully slow despite the multi-core cell processor because of the aforementioned swap issue.

Of course, you can install the gnu cross compiler for PPC on your lightning fast intel box and make the apps there. Or, if you start the PS3 in character mode, the memory is enough to allow decent compile speeds. Or so I have heard.

It would be oh so nice if the OpenSUSE build service supported PPC. Can't PPC be emulated using Xen or VirtualBox?

Probably not. I think they would need to set up a cross-compiler environment with all the PPC libs installed. I think it could be done, but it seems to me to be lots of work. Perhaps they need to add a PS3 to the network and compile using that :)

I think there should be an OpenSUSE-PS3 list. That would be a great idea. Who do we talk to?

I just asked this question and was told that the PPC list was the place to be. I confess I did not follow this up. Busy busy, you know. -- Roger Oberholtzer OPQ Systems / Ramböll RST Ramböll Sverige AB Krukmakargatan 21 P.O. Box 17009 SE-104 62 Stockholm, Sweden Office: Int +46 8-615 60 20 Mobile: Int +46 70-815 1696 -- "On two occasions I have been asked (by members of Parliament!), 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage 1791-1871) English computer pioneer, philosopher And remember: It is RSofT and there is always something under construction. It is like talking about a large city with all construction finished. Not impossible, but very unlikely. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org