There are many proposed solution to extract/reencode all those h264 mkv to be played on your PS3, but many of them are boring and don't work with all kinds of files.

Here is a solution that seems to work everytime with all h264 mkv. See at the end.

The first part of the solution was known for a long time, use Quicktime Pro then export to a mp4 with passthrough, but this didn't worked with all movies, you will learn why later.

  • First you need to install Perian which is a free quicktime plugin that add native support for most video formats, this is a great tool and you should have it anyway.
  • You also need Quicktime Player Pro (a registered version of Quicktime).
  • Open you mkv with Quicktime Player. (Menu File Open Files), stop the playing, wait for the grey progress bar at the bottom to complete (~5mn for a 4Gb movie).
  • In Quicktime Player Go in the menu Window, Properties of the movie (Proprietes de la sequence in french), and disable everything but the video track and one audio track, no subtitles.

capmkv1.jpg

  • Then in menu File, Export menu: choose mp4 as format, then click on Options, and choose the passthrough method, 10mn later your MP4 is ready to be played on your PS3, (I'm using mediatomb to stream this movie in DLNA to the PS3)

capmkv2.jpg

In fact the passthrough method can only manage one audio track and one video track, by default most mkv have the 1st subtitle enabled, that's why Quicktime did not want to passthrough it in mp4.

It takes only 10-20mn to generate, so the video is NOT reencoded, the quality remains.

Downsides: No subtitles possibilities, audio will be reencoded in stereo, no 5.1.

EDIT: I had many difficulties to play this files via DLNA streaming (network error), I don't know if it's related to mediatomb but I'm sure it's not an encoding problem cause the movies are working perfectly if they are downloaded on the ps3.
Remember the 2G max files size is not an issue anymore with recent ps3 firmware.

EDIT: After more and more test, this is not the good solution :(, many movies does not support this and the resulting movie does not work on the ps3.
Pray for mkv firmware update realy soon.