I have a rant about the Sony Playstation 3. Don’t get me wrong I love my PS3. I bought it as a present to myself for Christmas. I just think that Sony is moving so slowly with its development trying to milk every penny they can before the market forces them to improve their product. I bought my PS3 because of its multimedia functionality and Blue-Ray player rather than the gaming console. I have a few games for it that i play on random occasions. But i don’t use that function nearly as much as i use the multimedia functions. Now that I’ve had the Playstation for a while I’ve truly been able to see its ups and downs. And that is what i want to share.

Good this first. I was able to replace my bulky E-Machine PC with the clean slick PS3. It looks very nice under my TV. The PS3 has HDMI support. This was huge. The quality difference was amazing.  The PS3 also offers a “store” where you can buy/rent games and videos as well as a Hard Drive to store them on. In theory you can store all your videos and music on the local hard drive.  I don’t use it as i probably should but i can see how it could benefit some.

Now for the Con’s. My biggest problem with the PS3 is that it doesn’t support 3rd party applications or addons such as codec packs. Because of this, the damned thing can’t play half of the videos i have. Sony suggests i convert all my files to MP4 or some other bulky format. This not only costs me time but also costs me a lot of disk space. This also means that support for 3rd party services such as Netflix or Hulu are next to impossible to add. Because of this mess, those of us who want these features and conveniences have to go out and create workarounds and Mcgiver-ish solutions so that we can easily access ALL of our content on the PS3.

And thus the Media Server applications were born. The catch? This solution requires a PC to be on that has all your file stored on it. Thus defeating the purpose of the PS3 hard drive.(Not that 160GB can hold much…)  There are several out there. I use PS3 Media Server. I’ve also used TVersity & PlayOn. All of these have similar functionality and they all provide the same basic thing. They offer a way to let you play ALL of your videos and music on (or rather through) the PS3 regardless of what type of file it is. This is HUGE. This means that no matter what kind of file it is, the Media Server application can take that file and “transcode” it into a compatible PS3 file. Don’t get me wrong on this. I love these types of software and am thankful they exist. The problem i have is that Sony refuses to add native support for this type of thing ON THE PS3. If they only allowed 3rd party codec packs none of us would have to mess around with these Media Servers. We would be able to store all our files ON the PS3 and truly use it as a Multimedia Center. It would benefit both Sony AND the developers. Just like Apple, the Sony App store could carry these codec packs from various developers allowing the developers to charge a fee for them. Sony would get a cut and the developer would get paid for his time and effort.

Until then, all of us in the real world are stuck downloading various software to our PCs in hopes that it will be able to stream our videos to the PS3 so that we can watch them when and how we want.