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Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2008 8:34 am
by mgillespie
Each manufactuers forum, I am posting a sticky poll, so others can get a instant feel if other users are happy with their purchases.

Re: Are You Happy With You PS3 Hardware?

Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 5:23 pm
by Boogieman117
I've had no issues with my PS3 + Twonky. Matter of fact, it performs better with all file types then TVersity seems too.

Re: Are You Happy With You PS3 Hardware?

Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 2:22 pm
by licenced
I'm not voting as I'm in the middle.

I changed from a Roku, which was very easy to use.

The PS3 was easy to set up and easy as pie to connect to Twonky, but I'm not convinced yet about the PS3 as a machine - there are plenty of other boxes that can do what I'm asking of it (apart from BD and games, but I have no BD discs or PS3 games anyway) and it's noisier than I expected - in a media rack with a lot of space on all sides and top the fan comes on at top speed after watching a DVD for 20 minuutes, making the film unwatchable.

D

Re: Are You Happy With You PS3 Hardware?

Posted: Mon May 19, 2008 12:41 am
by mgillespie
licenced wrote:I'm not voting as I'm in the middle.

I changed from a Roku, which was very easy to use.

The PS3 was easy to set up and easy as pie to connect to Twonky, but I'm not convinced yet about the PS3 as a machine - there are plenty of other boxes that can do what I'm asking of it (apart from BD and games, but I have no BD discs or PS3 games anyway) and it's noisier than I expected - in a media rack with a lot of space on all sides and top the fan comes on at top speed after watching a DVD for 20 minuutes, making the film unwatchable.

D
I was really asking about it's capabilities/performance as a Twonky client. I posed the same question in all the forums, but forgot the PS3 (and 360 to a lesser degree) is so much more than just a Twonky client...

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 5:14 am
by oranges
Since sony put out firmware 2.20, divx playback has gone in the crapper. I get media is not supported in the middle of movies and it freezes. There is also a wicked bad studdering that happens on some videos.

I bought a ps3 primarily for its media playback and it worked great, until they screwed it up with the firmware upgrade. If I had a second chance there is no way i would buy a ps3.

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 11:12 am
by mgillespie
I had problems with Firmware 2.10, but not problems with 2.20, 2.30 or 2.35, everything works, including DivX

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Thu May 22, 2008 5:13 pm
by dquattlebum
New Here, I love the PS3 media properties. It was the only reason why I got it, well and the blue ray player.

Now just figuring out how to get my dvd covers to show when I'm browsing my videos...but thats a whole other issue.

Great forum!

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Sun May 25, 2008 7:18 pm
by cbhwr
Lving my PS3 all around, not too fond of it as a media client.

Why?
  • Too noisy
  • Too cumbersome to navigate
  • No IR receiver for universal remotes
  • Not scaling off-sized video correctly
  • Not supporting enough of MP4 capabilities
  • Not supporting enough codecs/containers
But I'm still using it for that very purpose a few times a month :)

/G

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Wed Jun 04, 2008 7:26 pm
by cbreaker
I'm happy with it, although I'll agree that the navigation isn't that great. I've never been fond of the cross-media bar, especially when you have multiple folders deep for music, movies, etc. I hope they change it someday to normal menus. Even my receiver has a better navigation system (it can play media from Twonky over the network as well.)

For the media playing abilities though, it's as good as I'd would have thought. It plays lots of my media, and will play full AC-3 or DTS audio from AVI files. I've been using a program called Avi.NET to encode my DVD's to DiVX with AC-3 and using Twonky to serve them up from my file server. It works great!

It plays all my MP3's no problem (although the song length is sometimes computed wrong on high bitrate VBR Mp3's) as well as my WMA's (unencrypted ones.)

My PS3 isn't very loud. Even full blast I only hear a muffled sound of air. My cable box is usually louder, actually. I am not sure what some people are doing to their PS3's but yea, it's not silent, but unless you're sitting in complete silence trying to watch a movie a extremely low volume, it shouldn't even be a complaint. I don't understand.

I would like Twonky to get some sort of basic audio transcoding though, so that the Internet Radio stuff would work. I get Unsupported Format on all of them. I understand that Video transcoding is a whole lot more demanding on a system and can be a nightmare dealing with codecs, but for audio it shouldn't be hard, no?

Overall I'm satisfied with Tonky + PS3. I have a few friends that use it as well, to much success. Just don't expect it to play every type of AVI file on the planet. (As no hardware media player will do.)

PS. The PS3 Scalar is awesome. It makes DVD's and DVD-Resolution videos look as good as a $1500 scalar would make them look. It's a big advantage of using the PS3 for playing these types of media. As far as the PS3 not correctly displaying anamorphic video in some cases: It's all about how the video was encoded and packaged into the AVI. A lot of downloads out there weren't encoded properly. Sometimes TVersity works better for these files (it presents the proper aspect ratio to the device.)

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 3:23 am
by kakalaky
Better xvid and x264 support along with the abilty to read matroska containers and play FLAC would make me like it much more. Using linux on it I can do all of these except 1080p x264 so it is usable for me. If only they would open up access to the RSX or I had time to write a cell optimized version of libx264.

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Tue Jun 10, 2008 6:36 pm
by mgillespie
cbreaker wrote:I'm happy with it, although I'll agree that the navigation isn't that great. I've never been fond of the cross-media bar, especially when you have multiple folders deep for music, movies, etc. I hope they change it someday to normal menus. Even my receiver has a better navigation system (it can play media from Twonky over the network as well.)
For all local media, you can categorize content by pressing triangle, Information, Album, and then set a custom tag, you can then sort by Album. Works for games, movies, music and photos.

See here for better explaination: http://uk.playstation.com/help-support/ ... es-On-PS3/

For Twonky served media, you can customise the media structure in the server settings.
cbreaker wrote: My PS3 isn't very loud. Even full blast I only hear a muffled sound of air. My cable box is usually louder, actually. I am not sure what some people are doing to their PS3's but yea, it's not silent, but unless you're sitting in complete silence trying to watch a movie a extremely low volume, it shouldn't even be a complaint. I don't understand.
Play some music.
Press triangle
Select the loudspeaker icon to get a volume slider
cbreaker wrote: I would like Twonky to get some sort of basic audio transcoding though, so that the Internet Radio stuff would work. I get Unsupported Format on all of them. I understand that Video transcoding is a whole lot more demanding on a system and can be a nightmare dealing with codecs, but for audio it shouldn't be hard, no?
See V5 Beta. Hopefully the next beta may be more PS3-friendly...
cbreaker wrote: PS. The PS3 Scalar is awesome. It makes DVD's and DVD-Resolution videos look as good as a $1500 scalar would make them look. It's a big advantage of using the PS3 for playing these types of media.
Indeed, with all the talk about Toshiba Cell-based super upscaler, what people are forgetting, is they can buy one TODAY!!!

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Sat Jun 14, 2008 3:39 am
by PopePhil
I'm using my PS3 with a Freecom FSG-3. All is good with audio and photo streaming, but Video always gives 'Unrecognised format' or somesuch. This is really disapointing, as this was the main reason (+BluRay) for getting the PS3.
Why does Twonky not just 'push' out the video in its native format for the PS3 to interpret (or at least have an option to), rather than trying to 'play' it across the network?

So, my response is MIXED.

I'm enjoying the limited gaming that I have time for, and BlueRay and upscaled DVD playback is fantasic.

WISHLIST:
1. The PS3 takes no notice of MP3 tags for music on USB drives or CD - always displaying albums in alphabetical order. FIX IT!

2. More visualisations for audio playback

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Sat Jun 14, 2008 6:25 pm
by mgillespie
PopePhil wrote: Why does Twonky not just 'push' out the video in its native format for the PS3 to interpret (or at least have an option to), rather than trying to 'play' it across the network?

So, my response is MIXED.
You need to stick to the supported formats, anything else, you are in trouble, same with ANY streaming hardware. Infact, the PS3 has wider support than all the other consoles and most dedicated video streaming clients.

If you stick to these, you will be fine:

MPEG1
MPEG2
H.264 AVC
DIVX*

*NOTE: DIVX and XVID ARE NOT THE SAME, AND MILAGE MAY VARY, DEPENDING ON THE ENCODING OPTIONS,...

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Mon Jun 16, 2008 2:01 am
by PopePhil
thanks Mark.
Interesting development; I've renamed all my DivX files to have .mpg extensions... and they now all work! Intriguingly, so do XviD files :o

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 7:08 am
by barrybuddon
Not really, I'm sick of Son'ys insistence that all PS3 owners are criminals, all I want to do is watch my own DVDs which I have ripped to a hard drive on the PS3. I do not want to change the files from Vobs to something else. Will Twonky play Vobs on the PS3? If not I'm off back to my 360 which can do hat is written on the tin!!!

Please help Thanks

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 8:29 am
by mgillespie
barrybuddon wrote:Not really, I'm sick of Son'ys insistence that all PS3 owners are criminals, all I want to do is watch my own DVDs which I have ripped to a hard drive on the PS3. I do not want to change the files from Vobs to something else. Will Twonky play Vobs on the PS3? If not I'm off back to my 360 which can do hat is written on the tin!!!

Please help Thanks
Twonky will stream unencrypted VOBS just find, and PS3 will play them. It's just MPEG2....

As for the criminal thing, every single product on the market that plays DVD's are subject to the same "criminal logic" you mention. It's called copy protection, and it's mandated, if you want to carry the DVD logo, you must implement it. Hardly Sony's fault. The 360 is in exactly the same boat (actually worse, as it supports far less streaming formats).

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Fri Jul 04, 2008 9:52 am
by mince-inside
Overall happy with PS3 as a client (Cat 6 wired) - find lack of album art a minor annoyance but not a show stopper (still not working with PS3 running ver 2.40)

Mr M

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 7:31 pm
by flynn
I'm satisfied enough to use it farily often, but I don't find the media playback features as powerful as I would expect - a couple I want:
  • Queuing. I'd like to be able to pick the next song, or folder/album to play and create a queue on the fly. I don't want playlist creation support, although that would probably do the trick.
  • Full adoption of album art. Abum art support for folders, not just files. I also find that the album art is too small (in the XMB and in the bottom left corner) - I think they could take more advantage of it by making it more pronounced.
  • Improved media server support. We can't play a folder, we can only play a song within a folder - this can, for example, make it impossible to play all songs by some artist when browsing by folder. Playlists (see Queuing above) and in-game XMB support only works with files on the local disk. I'd like to see these features brought to media server users.

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2008 11:20 pm
by Pilot16
yes, i am very pleased with it!

Twonky is running on my Mac G4, runs great... even with the latest PS3 firmware update (i was worried about this)

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Thu Aug 14, 2008 11:13 pm
by egant
ps3 (2.4.2) and twonkymedia 4.4.6 on opensuse 10.3 work very well. excellent results from an XVID (624 x 352 @ 23 fps) to 1080p TV over HDMI (ps3 reports MP3 2Ch. 48Khz audio stream at 150 kbps and MPEG-4 strem upto 1.4 Mbps) one minor gripe would be the ps3's xmb menu layout in so far as it includes a media server option under each of the music, photos and video headings, which might be better broken out to it's own menu item. if twonkymediaserver implements scrobbling that would be stellar...(you've heard that before !!) don't see the folks over at sony doing it in a hurry :)

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2008 10:09 pm
by Graham
Having recently bought a ps3 I can say I'm fairly happy with the media capabilities of it.

My previous/current setup involves a Nas with Ushare streaming to a 360 which in all honesty has been fine, more so than fine, perfect.

My only problem is a lot of the movies i download are in the mkv file format. Whilst the ps3 won't play thse files out the box i've a nice little program that converts them to m2ts with no lose of quality which the ps3 plays fine. Unfort Ushare doesnt like my ps3, or vice versa.

So i've installed Twonky and low and behold i can now play my mkv's/m2ts converts perfectly fine over a cat6 network.

The things I'm not impressed about is the time it takes for Twonky to update the shares on my Nas. It can take 5 minutes at a time, with Ushare its simply one click and I'm done. But thats a problem with Twonky and not the ps3, and more than likely my inability to configure Twonky properly.

As a media player somethings i'd like to see change on the ps3.

Support for the mkv container
Support for wmv's with 5.1 surround (everything i own has no sound through the ps3 yet on my 360 they play fine)
A skip chapter feature for files without chapters. The 360 skips 5 minutes a head, why can't the ps3?

These are the things that are putting me off paying for Twonky. Can i really warrent forking out that much just to play a bunch of m2ts when the 360 does everything else and MUCH better?

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Mon Sep 15, 2008 6:48 am
by cburkett
Running PS3 in family room and Popcornhour in theatre room. More than happy with PS3, easy to use for family. Previous had two Pinancle ShowCenter 1000 and a mediagate. Dont play games, just using it as a media center. PS3 is a lot user friendly, even wife can put music on.

Have nothing on PS3 drive, stream music HD movies photos etc. Best thing is that PS3 just keeps getting better with each firmware upgrade.

Would like support for the mkv container. Funny thng is that I can play mkv's on the popcorn using twonky but not on PS3.

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 7:23 pm
by Technane
The PS3 as a media centre managed to get me to switch off my Media server at the time being an instalation of Geexbox
its never ever had any issue playing anythign i have given it. its only been an issue in relation to certain Media Servers
when streaming to the PS3 believe it or not but i have found that for my personal goal of just streaming content on the server to the PS3 has best been served by Windows Media Player Network service.
but as i moved my OS to Windows Server 2008 I have not been able to enable this feature in WIndows Media player. So I have tested Tiversity and yes where it has come on leaps and bounds since its early models.
it is still a bit of a pain to use negatives on WMP is lack of thumbnails when browsing content and failing playback after pause.
Twonky fixed the pausing during playback but still no thumbnails on content? if anyone can suggest why this is the case I would appreciate it or if this is even a planned future addon?

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Sat Sep 27, 2008 8:22 pm
by tgibbs
I bought Twonkymedia primarily to stream video from my MacBook to my PS3, and it works quite well for that purpose, and also works with my XBox 360 (although I prefer my PS3, since it has better navigation and better scaling).

Only complaint I've had is that setting Rescan to -1 to automatically detect new content does not seem to work reliably.

The PS3 has fairly good video compatibility, but plays some but not all of the wmv files I've tried. I've tried to set up on-the-fly conversion from my MacBook using VLC (which plays those files fine) and Twonkymedia 5.0b1, but have been unsuccessful in getting it to work. I'm not sure whether the problem is with the Twonky beta or whether I did it incorrectly, as the Twonky beta instructions are sketchy and the Mac seems to have only a couple of example transcoding scripts.

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Wed Oct 15, 2008 4:00 pm
by gerho08
i am using twonky on a qnap ts 109 pro II with a ps3 as a media player (and an avr for flac-files)...for fotos it works fine..for music i use the avr and works fine too... but when it comes to camcorder-records (.m2ts) i m in trouble because the files are inkompatible...as i have been told this is due to the twonky, who cannt not handle .m2ts-files (unless renaming every file), which is very disappointing....m2ts-files via usb directly to ps3 work fine!!

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2008 5:45 pm
by probedb
There's a few things that annoy me about the PS3 as a media streamer:

- Won't send DTS bitstreams from mkv, avi, vobs etc, only from DVDs playing in the drive.
- Won't convert WMA 5.1 streams to AC3
- Stupid 2GB limit on certain files

Otherwise it's ok, would be nice if it natively supported the mkv container to save me changing container format. That and the DTS thing would really make it wonderful :)

Incidentally I've had no trouble streaming mpeg-2 based .ts or .m2ts files with ac3 soundtracks through Twonky.

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2009 7:40 am
by zenkinz
I have converted one of my movie to H.264 encoded format before, but PS3 doesn't appear to be able to play, it seems that Twonkymedia couldn't parse it properly?
mgillespie wrote:
PopePhil wrote: Why does Twonky not just 'push' out the video in its native format for the PS3 to interpret (or at least have an option to), rather than trying to 'play' it across the network?

So, my response is MIXED.
You need to stick to the supported formats, anything else, you are in trouble, same with ANY streaming hardware. Infact, the PS3 has wider support than all the other consoles and most dedicated video streaming clients.

If you stick to these, you will be fine:

MPEG1
MPEG2
H.264 AVC
DIVX*

*NOTE: DIVX and XVID ARE NOT THE SAME, AND MILAGE MAY VARY, DEPENDING ON THE ENCODING OPTIONS,...

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Sun Mar 08, 2009 12:20 pm
by turnippi
I used to have Ubuntu server with Mediatomb. It worked fine for music but not for pictures and videos. I just installed Twonkymedia and I am testing it.

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Wed Mar 18, 2009 3:21 pm
by steamhead
Generally I'm happy with the PS3 client capabilities, but have 2 bugbears.

1. Firmware updates tend to randomly scupper video playback, before fixing it a couple of releases later. This means whenever a firmware update comes out I have to wait, scour the forums and see if it's a wrecker of an update before deciding whether to apply it.

2. The XMB has Photo, Audio and Video options on the menu, but when you select a media server it gives you all 3 options again in the media server's menu. If you are not careful (especially when navigating between content types) you can navigate down a tree of the server to find no playable content e.g. you went down the Video leg from Audio on the XMB. Ideally, if the XMB is going to split Media servers across 3 disciplines it should automatically take you into that leg of the menu tree when you select a server OR if it is going to let you navigate down a tree inappropriate for the type on the XMB, support all types of playable content it finds at the bottom, not just the type you selected off the XMB.

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2017 12:40 pm
by morsabel
It works well and I don't have any problem at all.

Re: Are You Happy With Your PS3's Media Client capabilities?

Posted: Tue Nov 12, 2019 11:35 am
by gauripuri
Very well explained.