ps3 does not do everything

contrary to what sony will have you believe, the ps3 does not do everything. in fact, the subset of things it does do is so small, that I think the advertising campaign should actually say, "ps3: it does a couple of things".

my particular reason for bitching today is because the ps3 is _not_ a network media player. don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

in my case, I wanted to play an .avi file. sounds simple enough. but how do I get the ps3 to see my .avi file?
* the ps3 is not able to mount a network drive (over samba, nfs etc)
* the ps3 will not let you use it's harddrive to store media on it
* the ps3 will not read external hard drives. this isn't entirely true, it will see harddrives that are fat32 formatted. the issue with this is that fat32 only supports a max filesize of 4GB. so much for any blu ray backups. and who wants to connect a external harddrive to the ps3 anyways - it becomes unshareable. nas is the obvious way to go for home setups.

this is where you will be introduced to the one thing ps3 supports - a upnp server. whats a upnp server? it's a long story. but let me put it this way, as of this writing there are no stable upnp (free) servers out there. there are some good ones, but none of them can handle a decent sized media library without crashing.

so, once I get a upnp server running, and the ps3 can finally see my .avi file, what happens? Unsupported media. they did say everything, right? vlc, xbmc etc can play every format under the sun, and the ps3 can't play my .avi file? further note that:
* the ps3 will not let you install vlc
* the ps3 will not let you install linux or do anything else that is useful for that matter. they removed OtherOs support in 3.2 or earlier.

so, at this point I am introduced to my next option to get the ps3 to do play this file - transcoding. transcoding is the process of decoding a file, re-encoding it into a format the ps3 understand. transcoding is yucky. it is very cpu intensive and it is done once again on the flaky media server applications. once you try out transcoding, you will also be introduced to such things as latency, jitter, audio syncing issues. on the bright side, whatever machine you use for transcoding your files can also be used to fry an egg ('coz it gets hot).

so, something that can easily be achieved by mounting a network drive and launching vlc on any el cheapo network media server cannot be done on ps3.

everything? really?