I need something to stream my movies/tv shows to the tv.

Currently running media portal but have been looking at getting Apple TV / Popcorn Hour for some time now.

I'm considering the PS3 for the added bonus of games & Blu-ray.

Is the PS3MC worth it?

What's wrong with Media Portal?

yeh was just wondering what is wrong with Media Portal or Windows Media Centre.... this should do a much better job then anything else?

I have a PS3 and haven't even bothered with the Media Center part of it. Why would you want to go and pay for things when you have a perfectly good media center already?

Chasing HDMI :)

Then buy a 360 and make sure u get a HD cable and stream away. Its cheaper than a ps3 and in my opinion more value for money than the ps3 anyway.

i use medialink to stream everything from my mac. i would say "it's only $20", but our dollar is teh suck.

I have a ps3 for ps3 games
xbox360 for xbox360 games
appletv for streaming content & itunes/etc
xbox original for streaming content from the network

the ps3 sucks as a media center - it wont play even 1/3rd of the media on my network
the xbox360 sucks as a media center - same as above

the appletv is no better than the other two, it wont play anything i haven't converted to specifically play in itunes (.mp4) or that I have bought using itunes (its great as a quick & easy way to rent movies / play music for parties etc)
but I do actually purchase more legit media as a result of owning the ATV because the whole process is extremely painless

the original xbox + modchip + hdd upgrade is still by far the best media center i've ever used, it is 99% flawless
the 1% its missing is only due to the fact that its old and kind of pre dates hdmi / 1080p
it wont even do 780p for that matter, but it will play almost anything in almost any format i've been able to throw at it


imo, get a media specific PC and figure out a way of using a remote to control it, that way you can play any codec and have hdmi etc

Are you teq? The ute drifting guy?

I use Tversity and my PS3 and XBox 360 stream everything I throw at them.

hi slugman

the ps3 sucks as a media center - it wont play even 1/3rd of the media on my network

I use my PS3 as a media center, and it plays pretty much everything, even stuff the 360 wont play. I just have TVersity installed, and I stream full 1080p movies with 5.1 surround over the wireless, and it's fine.

The only things that wont work on it (that I've found) are videos in MKV files, but that's easily fixed by just remuxing them with a program called MKV2VOB. Takes about 5 mins, no worries.

Oh, and about what Teq said about the Xbox media center. Yeah, it's great, but if you have any interest in streaming HD content, you're out of luck.

if you want HDMI just buy ATI 4850 which does HDMI video and audio 7.1???
What ever you buy you cant do as much as a HTPC can do...

Yeah, if you've already got a HTPC, you would be better off just upgrading that for a fraction of the cost. You could get a Blu Ray drive too for about $200.

get a media specific PC and figure out a way of using a remote to control it

I have an iMon remote control thanks to Cerb.

if you want HDMI just buy ATI 4850

Unfortunately its a laptop.


All I'll be streaming are your usual .avi's

my laptop over vga works pretty good:

i dont need to record anything, so dont need a tuna

plays all my 720p medias (through wmp11) awesomely

plays my jams

and lets me surf and work on the 50" when i need to:

I'd love to have my PS3 as a media centre but it's built in ability to play media is pretty crappy. The idea of TVersity is ok but would be much better to have the PS3 as a standalone media device. I was hoping Megabox would go somewhere but haven't really seen or heard anything of it lately. With xbmc now being able to run on linux, that might end up being an option for the PS3.

Also, a friend bought this laptop last weekend, because it's running the GM45/M4500HD intel chipset, it can handle 1080p mkv's. Also has hdmi out and is pretty cheap considering.

heh cool, i've not seen tversity before - never really looked into using the ps3 as a media center beyond what was offered out of the box

sounds like it might be the way to go, im getting sick of the xbox because more and more of my media is 720p or higher these days
even though it will scale down to 420p, seems kinda pointless with a big expensive screen via RCA

and anything 1080 just refuses to play, can't even scale it down - plays about 2 secons then dies

The new XBMC for windows is pretty nice, I gave up on Media Portal after a while.

The Library stuff in XBMC kicks the snot out of the last MP version I tried.

With xbmc now being able to run on linux, that might end up being an option for the PS3.

Unlikely, Linux on the PS3 is absolute balls. I've spent ages trying to get something useful out of the PS3 running Linux, but the only useful thing I've found is using it to rip Blu Ray movies, which I never really want to do anyway.

I'm pretty sure that the s***tiness comes down to the restrictions that Sony put on the system, not being able to use the GPU.

I'd love to have my PS3 as a media centre but it's built in ability to play media is pretty crappy. The idea of TVersity is ok but would be much better to have the PS3 as a standalone media device.

What's the problem with TVersity? It's just a means to stream the content from your PC to the PS3. It doesn't need to transcode, as the system already supports DivX, Xvid, H.264, etc. Unless you don't want to stream fullstop. Is that what you mean?

having to turn on another pc/file server just so you can watch media, is what I think he was getting at there