CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

ecrabb

Guys,

A few of you have had PS3's for awhile (Kal, Brian, etc.)... Well, I have one now and I was wondering if somebody might have already gone to the trouble of finding all the fun media capabilities and how to do it. From the setup menu, I can see you can do photos, video, music, etc... but, is there is a quick-setup guide anywhere? Hacks? Server apps? Digest?

I did a quick search here and didn't find anything specific. I could go spend hours Googling and surfing forums myself, but a good place to start is always nice. We could make this thread into a "fun stuff for CRT'ers to do with the PS3" thread.

One thing I'd love to do with it is to be able to stream my HD .TS files I pull off my HD Tivo. Then, I could pretty much just use the HTPC for a media server - most of the time.

My only (minor) complaint with the PS3 so far is how the soft "keyboard" for entering usernames and passwords and such works - it sucks, in fact. It took me to minutes to put "Crabby" into the thing. The 360 is much faster. Minor complaint - everything else is beautifully designed from what I can tell so far. In the 20 minutes or so I had to spend with it, it looks VERY cool. I love the UI. Very slick an polished.

Thanks,
SC

ecrabb · Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2007 10:18 pm Post subject:

OK, I stopped being lazy and I see the 360 and PS3 are both DLNA network clients. I found this nice page on choosing a DLNA server:
http://www.rbgrn.net/blog/2007/08/how-to-choose-dlna-media-server-software-in-windows-mac-os-x-or-linux.html

Anybody tried anything besides WMP11 on XP (or MCE)?

Time to start reading and testing!

SC

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

Took me a couple of months to register with Sony online but I have yet to do anything other than play movies on it. There is suppose to be some nifty features with the 1.1 BD release, but again I have not tried any of this. Actually, I am trying to help the wife find someone to come over and re-setup my projector for me (Xmas gift for the wife). I'm having zero luck finding anyone. May have to go digital as a result. Crying or Very sad

ecrabb · Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 3:54 pm Post subject:

What? You can't set up your projector yourself? Do you mean you need somebody to calibrate it? If it's just setup you need, certainly there's somebody in Atlanta that can help you. Hell, buy me a cheap plane ticket and *I'll* come down over a weekend and help you set it up! Don't go DIGITAL!!!

OK, I did a little more reading, and it looks like there are a whole slew of DLNA/UPnP media servers. The ultimate goal is to use the 360 and/or PS3 to be able to avoid dealing with an HTPC 95% of the time. I want to be able to look at photos, play music, and most importantly, play back archived HD MPEG TS files that I recorded and didn't get a chance to watch. Will be fun for demo clips, too.

Options:
I'm a Mac guy, so I'm definitely going to try Elgato EyeConnect this weekend. There are a couple of other options, but they're free and look pretty crude. One's Java-based which I dislike.
http://www.elgato.com/elgato/na/mainmenu/products/software/EyeConnect.en.html

The Mac option would be great for me, as my entire iTunes library and all my photos reside on the Mac.

There are also several Windows servers I'll test. MythTV, TwonkyMedia, and supposedly there's a Nero media server that's pretty good.

http://www.mythtv.org/
http://www.twonkyvision.de/

That's all for now. Testing this weekend.

SC

Z-Photo · Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 4:53 pm Post subject:

Go with a blutooth keyboard with the PS3 - much better

the headsets (net games) is fairly cool also....

ecrabb · Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 8:49 pm Post subject:

Yes, after using the "soft" keyboard just to enter a username with the wireless controller (pain in the ass), a Bluetooth keyboard would be a good thing. The Bluetooth DVD remote works very nice, too.

As for a headseat, I've played some Live games on the 360 - Halo 3, Forza 2 Motorsports - so I know how cool that is. Now, all I need is an 8th day every week where the rest of the world doesn't know where I am...

I'll probably play Forza, Halo 3 and maybe Project Gotham racing on the 360 with a couple of friends on Live once in awhile, but so far I haven't see any games for the PS3 I just have to have. Maybe I missed something.

SC

oliverg · Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 10:34 pm Post subject:

I use a Bluetooth combo with my PS3.. its fantastic!

I wish I could use the mouse for some of the games (eg Resitstance of Man) but it doesn't seem to work.

The PS3 makes a good client for music, video and photos but in the end, I went back to the PC. (easier to customise) With the PS3 its more or less what you see is what you get! I have Server 2008 running with 6Tb of storage. Probably overkill when Home Server does most of what I want. There are some things that are great like having your own cache for HTTP content.

There aren't that many exceptional games on the PS3 yet. I've been let down by quite a few (Assasin's Creed, Heavenly Sword etc) but there are some better ones in the works. - the driving game that is free to download is really quite good!

ecrabb, have you checked out the "store" yet? lots of freebies!

Welwynnick · Joined: 04 May 2006 Posts: 229 Location: Welwyn, Herts, UK

I'm planning to get a PS3 AND a second PC, but I was wondering how people got on with the PS3 when used as an internet explorer?

Cheers, Nick

ecrabb · Posted: Wed Jan 02, 2008 5:52 pm Post subject:

The browser is great. Sucks with the controller (to enter text), but I think it would be fine with a keyboard and mouse.

OK, PS3 browser story. We had a few friends over for New Year's... We played Scene-It on 360 for a few hours and it was getting late (early?), we were all pretty toasted and were ready to call it a night. For the final hurrah, I pulled up The 30-Second Bunnies Theatre Library for everybody to see.

Now, I've seen these before by myself - and some of them are very funny - but, I almost had some people falling out of their recliners watching it as a group. I'm sure the alcohol had something (OK, a lot) to do with it, but you can click the right thumbstick on the PS3 controller and zoom in to fill the screen with smaller web page elements... Fight Club, Office Space, Pulp Fiction, The Shining, Titanic... Oh, God - it was hilarious. We watched about half of them and my face hurt from laughing so much.

The zoom comes in handy for certain other kinds of images you might find on the web, too - if you know what I mean. Think of zooming in on certain things on an 8-foot screen. It's SCARY.

SC

glenncurrie · Joined: 13 Jan 2008 Posts: 4 Location: Colorado

I'm new to this forum and to PS3 and hope someone can answer my question. How do you show a letterbox image with a DVD on the PS3? When I select 4:3 and Letter box it shows a square image?

ecrabb · Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2008 4:17 pm Post subject:

Glenn, that's a little off-topic for this thread - you might want to start a new one. For starters, what are all the aspect ratios in question (DVD, TV, PS3), and what connection(s) are you using (s-video, component, HDMI)?

SC

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270