The first step in my journey was to setup a DLNA Media Server to push my media to the Playstation.  I must admit that I was pretty disappointed that I couldn’t just set up SMB shares as I could on XBMC – but then the entire Playstation 3 experience isn’t terribly configurable (I guess Sony recon most people aren’t interested in tinkering!).  After a bit of reading on the AVSForums, I realised that my two options for the DNLA Media Server on Windows Vista x64 were Windows Media Player 11 and TVerstity.  Havnig a bit of a distruct of Windows Media Player, I opted to download and install TVersity from their site – however, during the install I was instructed to turn off UAC (Vista’s User Account Control security model).  I know a lot of people hate UAC but I see it as a serious step forward for Window’s security model and if programmers aren’t willing to write their software to cope and comply with it then I’m not interested in running it – so TVersity was ruled out leaving Windows Media Player as the only option.

Setting up DNLA Media Sharing on WMP11 (Windows Media Player 11) is straight forward – I was also able to add additional folders outside of the “My Videos” folder in my User Account folder visible.  Once this was done (and my PS3 was granted access), My computer showed up in the list of avaliable sources on the Playstation’s ‘Home’ screen and all of my Xvid files were immediatley made avaliable and played back without hassle (Complete with excellent upscaling and filtering with the Playstation 3 offers which smooths out nearly all compression artifacts without making the image appear out of focus).  However, all was not smooth as every 10 minutes or so the video stream would break up between key frames due to network dropouts – a problem which I had not experienced on the Xbox.  I presumed that the dropouts were due to the PS3 not using a large enough cache for the video stream; wireless networks are inherently dodgy and prone to dropouts – I could live with this for the time being, but I knew it would have to be addressed at some point.

I was fairly happy at this point – Xvids were playing back and looking better than on the Xbox, but it was time to try out some HD content and start playing back some video encoded using the h264 codec.

Using Handbrake, I converted a set of DVD VOBs into an MP4 file using the Playstation 3 preset.  The resulting MP4 file looked amazing on the computer via Quicktime and I was looking forward to being able to archive all my DVDs in this new, higher quality format.  I put the MP4 file into the “My Videos” file and then jumped onto the PS3.  When I first looked, I couldn’t see the MP4 file, so I restarted the PS3 – still no MP4 file – this is when I started to get a bit upset.

After a bit of googling I discovered that Windows Media Player 11 does not, by default, support the “discovery” of h264.  I was surprised by this as I had already installed the CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) and the files could play back via WMP11 on the PC.  Luckily there is a small registry hack (compatible with both Vista 32 and 64) which enables the discovery of h264 content.  Once the patch is installed and your computer is restarted, the PS3 will be able to see the mp4 files – excellent!  I dived onto the couch and hit the Play button the Remote – only to be bitterly disappointed.

Although the video played back (and looked fantastic compared to the Xvids before it) – the dropout made it un-watchable.  The video was stuttering all over the place!  A quick check via the ‘Select’ button showed that the video was trying to steam 5mbps over the wireless – seeing as 802.11g only offers an ideal bandwidth of 54mpbs (which is pretty much theoretical) I knew that asking it for 5mbps (plus the overhead from the DLNA services) was pushing it too far!  As my house doesn’t have CAT-5 running through the walls, my own hope was to purchase a set of HomePlug network devices to run the network data over my home’s powerlines.  I’ve always been a bit dubious of HomePlug’s and had heard negative things about them but seeing as I didn’t have many optins left, I opted for a pair of Linksys PLE200’s from Scan.co.uk (I was quite suprised that they were only £49 for a pack of 2, I expected to pay twice that much).  These devices touted that they were capable of stream HD Content over a network and could manage 200mbps (Which is a lovely bit of marketing seeing as they only have 100mbps interfaces – the 200mbps mentioned on the box is referring to the devices running in full duplex mode – and seeing as I only have a 100mbps router, it all becomes a bit of a moot point).

The Homeplugs arrived the next day and I set about installing them.  The box told me to install the management software before plugging them in.  I dutifly inserted the CD and ran the software only to be greeted by an error dialogue reading: “Failed to initialize Networks Interface – exiting”.  I guess the software that ships with the devices isn’t compatible with Vista x64 then.  Throwing caution to the window I proceeded to plug the devices in, wiring one into my router and the other into the back of the PS3.  I then headed to the Linksys website and began downloading the latest drivers for the PLE200.  The download was coming in at a miserable 60kbps so I switch my attention back over the PS3 and went to see if the devices would work without the managment software (after all they are network devices – what setup do the really need once they gain a DHCP lease from the router?).  To my suprise, the PS3 managed to gain a lease and sucessfully connect to the Internet – score one for Homeplugs!  Seeing as I live in a bungalow I don’t really see the point of enabling encryption on the devices (which I’m pretty sure would just limit the amout of avaliable bandwidth anyway due to the overhead) so I am yet to install the latest managment software (and to be honest, I don’t really want to install another bit of crapware on this box anyway!).

With the Homeplugs setup and my PS3 back on the network, I tried to watch the mp4 file again – to my delight it started playing back smoothly; a smile almost crept onto my face!

So, now that I had x264’s playing back, my last hurdle was to get true 720p HD content in the MKV container to play back on the PS3.  I knew already that the PS3 (nor WMP11) supports the MKV container (which is a great shame, as it’s the best replacement for the aging AVI contaner out there), so I jumped back onto Google and came across a guide which detailed How to Play MKV Files on the Playstation 3.  As MKV is just a container, your first step is to swap out the contained Video and Audio streams and place them into a container the PS3 can accept (VOB).  The piece of software which performs this magic mxing is called (immaginativley) MKV2VOB and does exactly what is says on the tin with no loss of quality.

MKV2VOB takes about a minute to swap the containers of a 120 minute MKV movie, once the conversion was complete I was able to see the resuling .mpg file on the PS3 but it complained about “Corrupt Data”, a commenter on an earlier Blog Post pointed out that he had to change the file extension to be “.MP4″ before the file would playback on the PS3 and sure enough this worked and I was able to watch the re-muxed MKV on the PS3 in glorious HD with an average datarate of almost 10mbps! – lovley stuff.  To make future transcoding easier, MKV2VOB has a setting in it’s Configuration tab to automatically rename the output file to .MP4 and then delete the source MKV – combined with a bit of scripting, it will probably be farily easy to get this conversion to happen automatically.

The only thing I need to figure out now is:

• How to get thumbnails to appear on the PS3 when browsing the Video’s served via WMP11
• How to change to way the folders are presented on the PS3 as all my media is currently buried under a massive folder hierarchy.  (Videos -> Folders -> Videos -> TV Shows!)