PS3 Media Server – The Best Video Media Streaming solution…for an XBox 360?!

In a word. Absolutely.

This is a first of a series of posts I’m planning on doing that describes how my WHS, Media Library and home is setup.

I’ve been meaning to revise my media streaming capabilities of my WHS for a while now, and with a significant amount of DVD’s ripped for use with Windows 7 Media Centre, I wanted to find a way in which these could also be used remotely via an XBox 360 (in addition to the other numerous formats I’ve now got, including HD Content as MKV’s).

So I never really got TVersity running smoothly, lots of video types simply didn’t work, transcoding never worked effectively and I was getting a little disillusioned. Basically apart from the core types of files, all of my other content was only usable in the office (or other Win 7 machines dotted around the house).

So last night, I started to hunt around with the view of changing my streaming solution to the house. Hidden deep within a WHS Forum on Media Streaming, I saw PS3MS mentioned.

So off I went with for a little digging…and came to the conclusion pretty darn quickly that it needed to be given a go.

Download was small (17Mb or so) and and install was quick. As it’s Java based it automatically pulled down the JRE as part of the install as well. Once complete, I then clicked run, added my WHS Media Shares, click Save and powered up the 360.

And this is where I then sat agape at my screen watching everything I threw at the 360 (via the Video Library option) render and play perfectly with no intervention from me. No codecs, no configuration, nothing. It just worked.

Even 720P MKV files were rendered in their full glory with no issue. Even more impressive was it was running and streaming all of this happily via a wireless adapter and the server was happily running along at around 50-60% CPU utilisation.

The icing on the cake was DVD ISO Transcoding. This remarkable piece of software, again with no tweaking, will automatically read a VIDEO_TS folder and create virtual video files of all of the titles on a ripped DVD which you can then play.

Every piece of video content I now have on my WHS (and there’s in excess of 300Gb’s worth) is now fully watchable remotely via my 360.

And it’s free. Really is a no brainer…

PS3 Media Centre’s main site is here and the official forum is here. If you stream, or want to stream content, to your 360 (or PS3), I highly recommend you give it a go.

Now I have one proviso, I haven’t managed Audio quite as impressively as Video as it seems to want all music files in the same folder. I’ve got almost 30Gb’s of music so this isn’t going to happen. Will be working through this little issue shortly as I’m sure there’s away around it.