So I downloaded House off of iTunes tonight and I wanted to play it on my PS3.  I was worried it was going to be some crazy protected format but it's just .MP4 and from what I read the PS3 is supposed to play those.

So I put my episode on my handy portable hard drive and plug it into my PS3.  The PS3 sees it but it says it's an unsupported file type and when I try to play it I get this message:

The data type is not supported
(800288C0)

What am I doing wrong?

DRM?

Oh crap, I had just thought it was just a MPEG-4 so it was a MP4 but it's a M4V, nevermind. These DRM's I hate.

@twemster, linux quicktime player, or if sony would let a quicktime player on their sytem it would work fine... handbreak might do the job never tried it for itunes files but works great at stripping protected dvds so i can get them on my ipod

no.

thats actually something people always whine about itunes.
their DRM makes its uncompetive to other brands, their DRMED files can be only be played in mac products, purchase pc and ipods

Hmm, so I converted it to an MP4 with no DRM (I can open it in Windows Media Player) and it still says it's Unsupported Data :-/

mp4 is a container like .mkv.  Whatever audio or video (or both) encoding iTunes uses isn't supported by the PS3 I guess.  You would have to re-encode the video with a codec the PS3 supports.

yea quicktime or you have to handbreak it... songs can ripped to cds and wont have drms, but saddly videos need the extra step

I thought I read somewhere the PS3 supported MP4's, what types does it support?

It does. But it's basically a file that just holds the audio and video portions (and subtitles and other things) together in one file. The actual audio and video streams are probably using codecs not supported by the PS3.

Use this: http://www.headbands.com/gspot/
I realize it says gspot and if you are over 12 years old, you might be wary of the link, but don't worry, it's completely safe.

It will tell you what audio and video codecs the file uses.

After finding out what codecs the file uses, you can determine which part the PS3 doesn't support (audio or video or both) and re-encode it to something the PS3 does support.  Of course, I think that this is technically illegal according to Apple's EULA, but there should be plenty of information on how to do it on the web.

And this is actually one reason why I hate digital downloads.  Hurray, I can play/watch something I bought only on things that the company I bought it from allows me to play/watch it on.  No thanks, I'll stick to encoding my own DVDs/CDs DRM free.