Playstation 3 Quirks

I've had to work around a few PS3 quirks in the last few weeks, so I figured I'd write them down.

The first quirk happens if you are hosting your wi-fi network via Mac OS X's built-in Internet Sharing. The PS3 can detect the network, but it fails to acquire an IP and so the connection fails. It turns out that Apple's DHCP implementation and the PS3 aren't compatible; the workaround is to manually assign an IP to the PS3. If you aren't sure how to do this, the subnet mask is 255.255.255.0, the gateway is 10.0.2.1, and the IP is up to you but I'd recommend something like 10.0.2.234.

(Big unknown: who is at fault? Is Apple's DHCP server flawed, or is the PS3 unable to handle Apple's valid-but-different-from-the-norm DHCP server?)

Second quirk: AVC movies ripped via Handbrake's "AppleTV" setting don't play on the PS3. It generates an error about unsupported data. The fix is to run the following command line:

perl -pi.bak -e "s|(avcC.{3}).(.{7}).|\1\x29\2\x29|" YourAVCFileHere.m4v

Apparently this tweaks some "magic number" in the AVC headers which corresponds to a complexity level. Anyway, this worked like a charm for me when I tried it. I discovered this here: http://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5907&start=0