Playing Quicktime HD Trailers on PS3

I have been seraching a solution to play my 1920 X 1080 Quicktime short videos on HDTV for my exhibitions. We have been using Mac Mini to store the QT file but the graphic card is not powerful enough so the video stutters sometime. After doing some search here might be a good solution (find it here), next thing is making it loop…

If you’re like me, then you’re a little disappointed by the limited number of movie (Blu-ray) trailers available for download on the Playstation Store. Granted, movie trailers aren’t usually the most interesting things in the world anyway, but they are cool for showing off your PS3/HDTV to others. Fortunately, Apple’s Quicktime comes to the rescue with a website FULL of movie trailers, and MANY available in both 1080p and 720p formats. The only problem… the movies are in the .mov Quicktime format… however the movie codec is standard mp4/H.264 which the PS3 can play!

Fortunately, Apple has included a movie export feature (in Quicktime Pro) that can remove the .mov container and save the files as standard mp4 files!

1) First make sure you have Quicktime Pro installed. You can download the installer from apple either on its own or as part of Itunes. The basic version is free, but the upgrade to pro costs $20 or $30 if you don’t already have a registration code.

2) Go to www.apple.com/trailers to download quicktime format movie trailers. Simly select your movie from the list, then choose the resolution. The file will automatically open in Quicktime player and will proceed to download. This can take some time on larger files. Once it’s done, watch the clip if you want, then go to the file menu and click “Export…”.

3) In the “Save exported file as:” dialog box, choose whatever filename you like, and in the “Export” drop down box select “Movie to MPEG-4”, and then click the “Options…” button.

4) In the file format drop down select “MP4” [not “MP4 (ISMA)”], and under Video Format select “Pass through”. If the video resolution shown at the bottom of the dialog box is EXACTLY 1920×1080 or 1280×720, then all is great, and you can skip step 5. Unfortunately most of the trailer files have odd resolutions like 1920×804 (because that is the aspect ratio of the movie) and will need to be resized.

5) If the file needs to be resized then under Video Format change the selection to “H.264”. You now have additional options. For Image Size select either 1920×1080 or 1280×720, then put a checkmark next to “preserve aspect ratio”, and make sure “Letterbox” is selected. Your video won’t be scaled but the video will have to be reencoded to add the black letterbox bars to create an HD resolution image. Under framerate, select “current”, and change the default bitrate to something more appropriate for HD video (anywhere from 8000-10000 seem to be reasonable values). If you want to do a multipass reencode for higher quality at the cost of additional encoding time, select the “Video options” button, and change the encoding mode to “Best Quality (Multi-pass)”

6) Select the “Audio” option in the main dropdown box and make sure that the audio is set to “pass through” — no reason to reencode if we don’t need to. If pass-through is greyed out then just leave the audio options at their default. Click OK to be returned to the main screen where you chose the file name. Click OK on that screen to begin exporting. If you don’t need to reencode the video this process will be over in only a couple of seconds. If you do, then it will take several minutes. Either way, once done you will have a PS3 compatible HD video file.

7) To get the file onto the PS3 you can either burn to CD/DVD or put the file onto a memory card for transfer.

This same export function can be used to convert most videos that Quicktime supports (including DV/HDV files you shot on your camcorder), so if you have a number of Quicktime files you’ve made you can easily export those to the PS3 as well. Of course there are a number of programs coming onto the market that can convert a wide variety of videos to PS3 compatible format, and some are free (which Quicktime Pro isn’t) but I’ve heard of many issues using those with Quicktime files, so for now this way works and is really pretty easy once you’ve done it once or twice. It’s also a fun way to confuse your friends by showing them a Universal Pictures clip in HD on the PS3 and telling them that it’s a Blu-ray preview .