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PS3+PSP = Watch your own videos EVERYWHERE!

Jul 9, 2008 12:47

With so many media formats and delivery mechanisms, we should be able to access our own videos, the stuff we have in our computers, anywhere in the house, especially in the toilet, and hopefully, anywhere on earth. As for me, all the pieces fell into place yesterday.

The final pieces of the jigsaw puzzle on "how to play your own videos anywhere" have been delivered. The Sony PS3 and Sony PSP are now far stronger together than any other mainstream entertainment solution on earth.

OK, let's put you in my shoes. I have a lot of media content in digital format, including my holiday photos and videos, and stuff I ripped from DVDs and CDs which I bought. Everything is stored on a RAID-5 Thecus N3200 3-bay Network Attached Storage device. This NAS is connected to my home network and placed in my study where my kid won't hit it with a tennis racket and the dog won't piss on it. Since irreplacable photos are on this thing, it's running on RAID-5 so the eventuality of a harddisk drive failure is guarded against--if one drive crashes, just put a fresh drive in and it will automatically rebuild without any data loss. 

What I would like to do is to view my content anywhere. "Anywhere" is a big word, so let's split it into three places:

1. View it in my living room HDTV which is connected to my PS3.


2. View it in the toilet for the quick 30-minute crap session


3. View it somewhere far away, like a hotel room in Australia, so my kid can be occupied by Kipper the Dog while I take a nap.

Two weeks ago, before a patch for the Thecus N3200 firmware was released, the PS3 couldn't see what was in the NAS. I had to either burn the content on a DVD and play it in my living room, or connect a computer to my HDTV and use a media player to play a video, with a mess of wires everywhere. Or shrink the video into a smaller size and store it on a Memory Stick so I could watch it on the PSP. Man, how things change... so here's what I do now!

View it with the PS3 in the living room HDTV
Done! Thecus released a firmware patch which fixes the DLNA server software in the NAS. Rather, the fault seems to be in the Sony PS3's non-standard DLNA implementation. So now Thecus merely accommodated the picky PS3. Bottom line, it now works, and the PS3 can see all the media content in my Thecus NAS and play all the properly encoded MPEG-2, -4, h264, DivX, MP3 and other formats.

View it in the toilet with a PSP
Done! With the Private Network Remote Play function of the PSP, just leave the PS3 in remote play mode, and register the PSP device in the PS3 (a one-time, one-step process), and provided you still have time to grab the PSP in a mad rush to the loo, you'd be able to play whatever your PS3 can play, in great quality, full color and good sound.

View it in the hotel room in Australia with a PSP
Done! Using the Internet Network Remote Play function in the PSP, find a Wi-Fi point and connect the PSP to it, and you can sign onto the PlayStation Network using your PSP and then access your PS3 at home and stream videos, pictures and music. Whatever your PS3 can play and draw from your NAS device, you can view them. No more tens of hours of rushed re-encoding or re-ripping of videos just hours before your holiday!

What all this means is that your private media content collection can be accessed by Sony devices anywhere, everywhere--anywhere which has a Wi-Fi point, that is. The Xbox is also a DLNA device, BUT it doesn't come with a little companion like the PSP, or is as cheap as the PSP. What it also means is that this kinda geewhiz access is not achievable by only tech heroes anymore. ANYBODY WITH A NAS, PSP AND PS3 CAN DO IT.

The reason I use a NAS and not a PC to store my stuff is that the NAS can be left permanently on with little power drain, and is built for that. A PC just has too much going on, and left permanently on it takes more than four times the power since we're powering the super graphics card and 2GB of memory and a 3GHz CPU, too. Best of all, NAS devices have built-in RAID capability, which can be had in a PC, too, with more complication and more heat. Bottom line--greener, safer and more convenient.

In any case, Sony has made the most versatile entertainment devices in the world, the PS3 and the PSP, and not a word of Blu-ray is to be seen in this blogpost.

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