Is there a way to write protect the video on a PS3?

[Que2]

Is there a way to write protect the video on a PS3?

I have my PS3 connected to a 1TB USB external Hard Drive. I have converted many of my home movies over and want to write protect them so my family does not accidentally delete them. If they were small enough to be on a USB key then I could use a hardware write protect switch. I have not heard of a hardware write protect switch for Hard Drives of any appreciable size. I must format the disk FAT32 and it does not matter what attribute that I set such as readonly and/or system still you can delete it on the PS3. I am using the 1.90 bios.

I have heard of a USB device that you can put in between the USB connection on the PS3 and the USB hard drive that is used in forensics that would make the USB Hard Drive Read only. But this forensics device is $300+ and probably is not compatible with the PS3.

Can I create another profile on my PS3 and just give it read access to video?

I have contacted Sony technical support to no avail.

Does any one out there have any ideas or have tried keeping their content from being deleted.
Is there an external unit that has a write protect switch, that doesn't break the bank?

[rallynavvie]

Well...

Since it's a 1TB drive can you just make two equal partitions and lock one out on the file system level so that you essentially have redundancy on the drive itself? I have a hard time believing family videos take up 500GB of space when rendered into MPEG4, even if they're HD. Make use of the space.

Your other option would be to attach the drive to a PC that's on the same network as your PS3 and serve the video to it. Now that the PS3 supports streaming media sources you can use something like TVersity to playback videos. I have a GbE wired network for my Media Center PC and PS3 and get fantastic results. I usually do encode to MPEG4 first before sharing the media to the PS3 but since you've already got it encoded on that drive you just need to share out the drive.

[rhegedus]

It's quite difficult to delete files on the PS3 from the XMB unless you really want to - if it happened it would be intentional.

[Que2]

Thanks for the replies!

Rallynavvie, the family's videos also include porting over my DVD collection as well.
I already have the 1TB drive 1/4 full already and I plan to fill it up. I can not put all of my 900 disc "legally purchased" DVD collection on but I am shooting for 1/3. I just reached a point I was tired of going on a 10 minute search through my disks in order to find the videos that I wanted to see or show someone else.

>>Since it's a 1TB drive can you just make two equal partitions and lock one out on the file system ...

Anyhow that 1TB drive like a majority today is a Raid 0 so I do not put much trust in it for an on disk backup.
Plus, I have redundancy already since I am backing up to a 1.1TB RAID array on one of my other systems.

The point about streaming the video rather than locally attached I have considered.
Although I am concerned about speed since I do not have a wired network. I have a wireless G network and sending such massive content over that would send it into depression. Unfortunate since space is limited in our basement/media room and I am trying to keep wired runs to a minimum it would be impractical to do wired Ethernet. I had been holding off on upgrading to N but it seems to have solidified as a standard now. Do you know how practical it would be to stream using N?

Rhegedus,
Yea, I know it warns you... but with curious kids... and as much time I have given to the effort of porting my video...

I swear it seems easier to delete video with 1.90 than 1.82 since you see the icon on the screen for the options button which leads you to the option of deleting the media.

It is too bad Sony does not give you a way. I think this is true for photos and music as well.

[rallynavvie]

I wonder if they won't come up with some way of write-protecting the files displayed on the PS3 itself, but there are plenty of other things the PS3 needs to add (like downloading content while playing movies for instance).

It wouldn't hurt to try streaming over your G network and seeing what the results are like. If you have the videos transcoded to MPEG4 already then you can turn off the realtime encoding on TVersity and just try serving them out to the PS3. I'm guessing the PS3 will discover it over the wireless just like it would when I had mine wired. The application is freeware. The interface is a little simplistic but it works most of the time.

[Que2]

Thanks Rallynavvie, I will give streaming a try.

[Que2]

Streaming on G did not work out. I tried TVersity, Windows Media Player Streaming, and several other packages. In some cases even got streaming to work but not consistently. Do not even ask about video streaming, I could not get audio streaming to work on a consistent basis. Windows Media Player was the most stable but still just like every other package I tried the PS3 seemed to have trouble discovering on its own that a Media Server was available, sometimes it would show up after a 5-20 minute wait and other times it just would not work. If you click on Discover a Media Server the PS3 would clear out any Media Server that you were connected to and sometimes they just did not come back at all or did after a 20 minute wait. I had fun trying to navigate my Media Server from the PS3 and accidentally select the Discover Media Server option and have everything disappear (This happened to me many times.)

I have given up on the streaming option.

On a good note I am almost finished filling up the 1TB. Currently I have 490 videos using 830GB of space with around 70GB or so left. The PS3 is a wonderful media center. They have improved so many things but I hope they add some improvements to allow me to protect my Media as well as support for exFat. (But I know they have so much to fix on so many sides :/)