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  1. Hi all... I just got a PS3.. Seems like the possibilities are endless with this system! I love it this far... I have several Qs but will start with a couple... I have several movies on my HDD.. how can I watch them via USB? Also.. how do I or what do I need to connect an external HDD to the system? and where do I find it once connected?!? Thanks a lot..
    Last edited by emim; 18th Jan 2011 at 19:45.
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  2. Always Watching guns1inger's Avatar
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    1. The HDD must be formatted as Fat32. The PS3 will not recognise or read NTFS formatted drives.
    2. Simply plug the (FAT32 formatted) drive into one of the USB slots (any one) and the drive will appear under the various menus in the Xmedia bar.
    3. The PS will only play videos from the Videos menu, and only play audio from the Audio menu etc.

    A detailed walkthrough can be found here, including the folder structure that the PS3 needs to auto find your media.

    Note : I find the automatic seeking of media using the file structure to be very slow. It is simpler to press the triangle button and select Display All from the menu. This will display all appropriate media for the menu, as well a sub-folders, but without the extended pause as the PS3 tries to (temporarily) catalog everything.
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  3. Member yoda313's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by emim
    Seems like the possibilities are endless with this system
    Unfortunately if you do a lot with video you will find the ps3 is far from the perfect system. It does not do everything.

    HOWEVER one workaround is to stream video to it. Its almost required to do streaming with a physical lan connection through a router as wireless streaming is spotty at best and I don't believe there are any wireless n routers that are compatible with the ps3 (as far as I know all the internal wireless components for the ps3 are G unless the newer ps3's started shipping with N capabilites).

    Basically streaming lets you send any video to the ps3 and the computer will transcode it so that the ps3 will play it. It requires a pretty fast computer (dual core or better). Also seeking through video files can be sticky compared to seeking backward and forwards on disc media.

    If you truly want a hard drive system for virtually limitless playback options from a harddrive you may want to look into a wdtv media player or one of its competitors. They work with ntfs hard drives that don't have a 4gb file limit on indiviual files. Also they play just about any file you throw at it and newer models have internet capabilities like youtube and netflix depending on the exact model you are looking at.

    The ps3 is a decent media player but you will have to tailor some of your videos to work properly on it. You can't simply dump any video on it and expect it to play it. Unless you stream to it with something like ps3mediaserver.
    Donatello - The Shredder? Michelangelo - Maybe all that hardware is for making coleslaw?
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  4. Ok.. So i'm streaming via ps3mediaserver.... a littl slow at times but works great! Thank you much to all...
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  5. Member yoda313's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by emim View Post
    Ok.. So i'm streaming via ps3mediaserver.... a littl slow at times but works great! Thank you much to all...
    Sounds good.

    Are you connected via lan or wireless? Lan should give you excellent results.

    Also do you have at least a dual core processor? Any less and it won't be a smooth road at all. Also don't do any video encoding or other heavy cpu task while streaming.

    There are other streaming programs to check out as well. Playon and tversity are two examples.
    Donatello - The Shredder? Michelangelo - Maybe all that hardware is for making coleslaw?
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  6. So I realized that via ps3mediaserver, I can just copy the movie I want to watch to the PS3 and no interruptions... takes a while depending on the size of course but works great!!
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    Not to undermine Yoda, but when he said it "it does not do everything" I think he was just being generous to the brand

    I feel a more accurate description would be that " it hardly does anything"

    Oh, it does do a lot as mentioned above by others but nothing comes easy to it and without the ability to read NTFS drives why even bother with it? Recently Seagate has been unloading their Fat+s for $39-49 and these players will just about play anything off a hard disk and they stream.

    Three years ago when I bought my PS3 I plugged a hard disk into the USB slot and movies that would play on my Philips 5990 effortlessly seemed to be problematic with the PS3. When Netflix sent me a disk to do streaming I felt better about the PS3. But, as soon as I switched to a Media player(doesn't seem to matter which one) I just don't ever use my PS3 for anything other than playing plastic disks.

    Tony
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    i also use ps3 media server.i find its spot on especialy with Larg MKV files.
    i have 2 ps3 & the kids can watch both at the same time.crashes once in a blue moon.but still very good.
    i have 6TB of movies & tv shows they can look at.all stream from my ps thats on 24/7
    i found its the most compatible with MKV so far.
    you can use windows 7 to do the same streaming but i had problems with mkv
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