Rivet 2.0: PS3 Support and a Free Upgrade
Posted January 22nd, 2009 @ 08:00am by Erik J. Barzeski
I'm pleased to announce the release of Rivet 2.0, a free upgrade to all Rivet 1.0 customers and a product that's holding steady at its $18.95 price despite the doubling of its feature set.
Rivet 2.0 supports both the Xbox 360 and the PS3!
In addition to supporting the PS3, this release has several other features and improvements:
- Displays photos within deeply nested projects/folders in Aperture. Prior versions would fail at about three to four levels.
- Dramatically speeds up load times of media and photo thumbnail loading by as much as 800%.
- Fixed file size info for files larger then 4 GB ((If, of course, the console supports playback of that file and encoding type.)). If you've got a file that big, it'll stream now.
- Fixed folder parsing for items in folders more than six levels deep.
- Fixed an issue that caused problems when folders contained folders and files.
- Fixed an issue that caused the iTunes library parser to abort and list no tracks.
- Removed the filtering of iTunes Plus files because the PS3 plays them.
Unlike some other companies, who would have you spend $40 and run two applications, Rivet is an all-in-one solution for $18.95, and again, a free upgrade to anyone with a license.
Download a demo, upgrade your copy, or buy a license today at http://cynicalpeak.com/rivet/.
P.S. The latest firmware update for the PS3, version 2.5, cripples H.264 playback to the point of appearing broken. Playback is unusually sensitive to bitrates on H.264 files while AVI files with similar or higher bitrates play back without problems. A firmware update from Sony should resolve the problem, as prior versions didn't experience this issue.
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Posted 22 Jan 2009 at 8:25am #
Now all I need is a new job...then I can buy that Xbox 360 on my wishlist...then I can buy that copy of Rivet 🙂
Posted 22 Jan 2009 at 8:34am #
Awesome to see it working on the PS3. I've been waiting to try it for a long time, so I installed it right away. One problem though...I have quite a few movies remuxed from MKV to VOB or MPG. Medialink shows and plays these files fine on the PS3, but Rivet seems to be filtering them out.
Overall, seems like an improvement over Medialink and I'll definitely consider switching if I can play all of my files.
Posted 22 Jan 2009 at 9:23am #
[quote comment="52394"]I have quite a few movies remuxed from MKV to VOB or MPG.[/quote]
MediaLink transcodes (which is also why it can suck up a lot of resources). Rivet filters out whatever files don't play on the target platform.
Posted 22 Jan 2009 at 9:43am #
I'm using mkv2vob under VMWare Fusion to convert MKV movies to what it claims are .vob. The programmers also claim that these files are PS3 compatible. Streaming a 720p copy of The Dark Knight (a VOB file) to the PS3 using Medialink is using less than 15% of the CPU on my MB, so it doesn't seem as though it's transcoding the file on the fly.
A quick Google search came up with this so I tried changing the extension of The Dark Knight to .mp4 and that enabled it to play fine using Rivet.
Posted 22 Jan 2009 at 6:05pm #
Thanks for the info Jason. I'll try converting a couple mkv files I have and see what's going on. I'm betting the mime type isn't being set correctly for them and they're getting filtered out due to it.
Posted 22 Jan 2009 at 9:45am #
Congrats!
Also, Sony says that the upcoming PS3 firmware update (2.60) will include Divx 3.11 support. Details here.
Posted 22 Jan 2009 at 6:02pm #
Nice, hopefully they'll have fixes in it for the h.264 streaming issue too. Now we just need to get them to add mkv support.
Posted 22 Jan 2009 at 9:58am #
[quote comment="52397"]A quick Google search came up with this so I tried changing the extension of The Dark Knight to .mp4 and that enabled it to play fine using Rivet.[/quote]
Thanks. That's a good tip for PS3 owners. We'll see what we can do to support VOBs without the file-name-extension twiddling, but it seems to be a long-standing issue, too, so I don't know what's possible (or feasible) here.
[quote comment="52398"]Also, Sony says that the upcoming PS3 firmware update (2.60) will include Divx 3.11 support. Details here[/quote]
Thanks. We'll do what we can when it's released. We can't do much before then. 🙂
Posted 22 Jan 2009 at 1:13pm #
Sounds cool -- I'll need to try it on my PS3.
Posted 22 Jan 2009 at 10:21pm #
I have been using Rivet since it first came out.
I have an Airport Express, a Drobo loaded with movies, Xbox 360, MacBook Pro and a 42 inch HD Plasma.
Rivet plays all my Drobo stored movies and they look great.
Previously, I had to load my movies on a USB stick and play it thru my DVD player. What a pain....
For the price of two movie tickets, you can see all your movies on your Mac, on your TV.
Posted 17 Dec 2009 at 6:23pm #
Any luck on sending out a "wakeup" ping to attached hard-drives on a Time Capsule? (NAS)
My media drive is connected to my time capsule so I can stay mobile with my laptop which is running Rivet. Problem is the drive goes to sleep (no idea how to tell it to stop that might be firmware issue in enclosure) and it needs to be file accessed to wake it up. Rivet doesn't seem to issue that command when looking for it IF the drive is in this NAS configuration. It does do it when the drive is attached directly to my MBP.
Thanks for any advice.