Using My PS3 as a Media Hub for my Living Room: Part II of an Xbox 360 Owner's Impressions
164 days 14 hours ago
| by:
whengeeksgobad
Previously, I discussed my experiences in fidgeting with my new ps3. You can read about them here.
For those not wanting to read the whole thing, a quick rundown: I'm a mac user with both a ps3 and an xb360 interested in using either console as a media hub for my living room. *I want to stress here that due to limitations of my own setup and preferences, I was unable to get everything working just as I'd hoped.* Quite a few helpful users offered advice along the lines of formatting my external HD for fat32, which would most certainly address the issue. Problem is, I'm using the external hard drive for HD content, all of which exceeds the 4 gig file size limit which exists on fat32. The other issue is that the ps3 doesn't natively play .mkv's. I'd need to transcode everything, or find something to transcode/stream to the ps3 or xbox to make it work.
As far as my setup goes presently, I'm running quad core 2.66 ghz mac pro with 4 gig of ram. Both consoles hooked up via ethernet but the mac pro is actually connected via Draft-N wireless - more on this in a moment.
The Problem:
Long before I had my ps3, I was using the xb360 and an external HD stuffed with hd-wmv's to watch HD content. This was easy and quick, but it was also very loud. Furthermore, my selection of movies was rather scarce, as hd-wmv's with 5.1 dolby digital (ala WMA pro) are not that easy to get my hands on, or make. AAC 5.1 channel audio using the h.264 MKV's are quite popular these days, and I wanted something that could play those.
It's worth noting that if I did not want to go with a console, the Popcorn Hour A-110 is really slick. In fact, I'm still considering one, or perhaps even the c-200. Either of which can be had for under 350. Both of which do nearly everything I like (sans play games or physical media - dvd's and bluray etc). Nothing would need to be streamed as far as hd content went, you could just install an internal hard drive and use the ftp server and bittorrent client to slurp/view files right off that unit itself. Pretty neat. This is where I'd like to see the ps3 and xbox360 go actually. With the inclusion of playon, you could watch Hulu or whatever, in addition to all of your content stored locally on that box and just ftp whatever else you wanted to on the fly.
If I were using a PC, I'd just drop Tversity on it and call it a day. In theory, I could run Tversity within Parallels, but I don't have much faith in that working. I did however decide that playon was easy enough to get running and took very few resources to run in parallels. When I feel like watching Hulu on the ps3 I can just fire up the xp install I have and viola. Not exactly easy, but not hard at all either.
Enter PS3 Media Server: Free Mac/PC/Linux Solution
A coworker clued me in to his experiences messing with ps3 media server in Linux. He indicated that not only was it free, but it worked as advertised and was pretty easy to setup. Basically, ps3 media server allows you to share/stream all of your movies/music/photos from your mac/ps/linux box to your ps3. In cases where you are streaming a file unrecogizned by the ps3, the content is transcoded and streamed to the ps3 on the fly in a recognizeable format. The ps3 media server website can be found here.
After installing ps3 media server I fired up the ps3 and sure enough, the ps3 saw my local media server as though it would any other upnp content sharing service on the network. SWEET!
The Headaches:
Once I saw the the ps3 media server in the XMB, I immediately tried to stream one of my hd-wmv's to the ps3. The picture looked great, but no audio. This relates back to why I wanted to move away from hd-wmv's in the first place. If you want 6 channel audio while watching digital content on your 360, IT MUST be encoded in WMA pro. Guess what audio codec isn't compatible with the PS3: yup - wma pro.
Although in the end, it was *kind of* easy to get setup, it took a fair deal of time for a novice like me to get it all figured out. It mostly involved finding the most up-to-date beta of the ps3 media server, and network config stuff. It's likely anyone with a little technical know-how could do it, but it's not something you could walk your mother through over the telephone.
After getting everything setup, I wanted to see if there were any problems streaming 1080p content as opposed to 720p. I found that generally speaking, during high detail scenes the 1080p content would really start to jitter. This never occurred while streaming 720 content. In my experience, 1080p content is not streamable via wireless to the ps3, not even when the pc you are using to stream the content from is 801.11N. Go ethernet. As an alternative, you can change some of the encoding/transcoding values to a lower quality so its not so bandwidth intensive, but this wasn't an ideal option for me.
Where I am at Now
With ps3 media server I am able to stream all of my content to the ps3 from my mac. This is something I believe a lot of mac users have been looking for, and I'm comfortable with the solution.
I believe I've come a long way in not only better understanding the functionality of the ps3/360, but also how I, as a mac user, can get the most out of either. I can't stress enough the value of programs like connect360, playon, and ps3 media server. I also can't express how much fun it can be to tinker with this stuff. Next up, I believe I'll be doing a feature by feature breakdown of both the xb360, as well the ps3 within the context of using it as a media hub. Thanks for reading!
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