I have to admit that I’m a spoilt brat.  At Christmas my lovely wife gave me a PS3 (I think she noticed me looking at them at some point but got sick of the “I’m too busy…I’d never use it…” lines that came from me).  Unfortunately, I was too busy and never used it – the games I liked a) weren’t widespread on PS3’s (RPG games) and b) I’m so bad at game playing that it takes me ages to get anywhere c) I kept getting killed by 9 year old kids online.

But then I heard about a feature of the PS3…you can stream to it.

What Is Streaming?
“Streaming” is the delivery of media, such as movies and live presentations, over a network in real time. A computer (a streaming server) sends the media to another computer (a client computer), which plays the media as it is delivered. With streaming, no files are downloaded to the viewer’s hard disk.

And with the built in wireless networking, you can stream without all those horrible yellow network cables (as long as you have the PC hardware, of course).

To start with, I found that windows media player could stream music and video.  It worked with a bit of fiddling but the biggest problem was the PS3 – it could only play certain formats so if I wanted to play a .ogg format piece of music – the PS3 couldn’t handle it.

Then I found a great piece of software – TVersity.  It streams well – you tell TVersity where your music / pictures / movies are and it creates a library of files which it then gives access to your PS3.  But the best thing is if the file is in a format that your PS3 can’t handle – TVersity automatically converts it so you CAN play it on your PS3!

And the cost for this piece of wizardry?  Absolutely nothing – the software is free.  Not free from bugs, unfortunately (I never did get it to work as a system service) but it works fantastically.

In the past I would watch a (legally, of course) downloaded movie from my PC chair but now that I can watch it from the comfort of my living room on my nice, big telly it certainly improves the experience.

Now I just need to sort out my wireless network signal strength – there’s a lot of walls / kitchen in the way and sometimes can cause problems – but that’s another story…

Martin

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