Playstation 3 Just Got Better

As of this morning Sony released a new minor PS 3 Firmware, upgrading the PS 3 to version 1.80. While the increment was minor it packed a few new features including:

• 1080p output scaling for DVDs
• 1080i/p output scaling for PS1 and PS 2 games (yes that's hi-def PS 2)
• Support for DLNA media servers

So what is a DLNA media server you ask? The DLNA is a consortium of companies which sponsor a UPnP media server system. Programs such as Windows Media Connect, Nero HomeShow, Myth TV, and Xbox Media Center all support this protocol. Basically it's a way to stream media from one system and play it back on another.

What's this mean for the PS 3? I can stream movies over the network to it just like with my haxx0red Xbox. That's right the PS 3 is now a media center device you can use to for listening to streamed music, and watching streamed videos! The only downside of the whole thing is PS 3's limited support for different file formats. For some reason the PS 3 only supports the following video formats:

• MPEG4-SP
• MPEG4-AVC
• MPEG2

For those of you unfamiliar with the MPEG 4 spec you'll know MPEG4-SP as some very low bitrate mobile version of MPEG4, and MPEG4-AVC as h.264 . The problem with this is that I have very few h.264 media files. Most of my movies (that aren't just ISOs) are in the MPEG4-ASP format, also known as Xvid, or Divx. Of course this "Advanced Simple Profile" isn't supported directly by the PS 3 so I can't watch most of my videos.

Luckily I purchased Nero 6 a couple years ago and it comes with a Nero HomeShow which can do on the fly transcoding of some videos. As I'm using this as my Media Server it can transcode all my Xvid files to MPEG2 on the fly. The only downside is that for most Xvid files this doesn't look good as the Xvid source is to low of a bitrate/resolution which doesn't transcode very well on the fly. In any case the better encoded stuff still looks pretty good, and while it's not quite as pretty as the Xbox it's good enough for most things (then again I'm not testing my Xbox on a 1080i capable display). Now I just need to find myself a good transcoding Linux server so I setup a Linux file server.