Hey Sony, how about some media server software?

I’ve been playing around with streaming media (primarily video) from my iMac to my PS3. I’ve tried a couple of different streaming solutions, amongst them MediaLink and MediaTomb, and have finally landed on the (most of the time) excellent PS3 Media Server. It’s free (as in beer), open source (GPL v2), available on Mac, Linux and Windows and it works (most of the time).

PS3 Media Server works better than everything else I’ve tried and does transcoding so that I can play .mkv and other formats that the PS3 otherwise doesn’t support. No real setup, it worked right out of the box so to speak. Install and run, that’s it. Naturally it is very tweakable and you can probably spend hours and hours fidgetting about with all the different settings.

However, just like everything else I’ve tried there are bugs, some more annoying than others, and this got me thinking. Why hasn’t Sony themselves released a media streaming solution for the PS3? I mean, Microsoft have Windows Media Player working together with the Xbox 360 and iTunes has a similar relationship with AppleTV. So I’m thinking, wouldn’t the company that actually designed the PS3 be best suited to author media streaming software for the console? Makes sense right?

I don’t know why Sony hasn’t released a media server application of their own and I don’t know if they ever will. But if they don’t they should at least make an effort to help out the developers working on these applications, publish detailed specifications, and so on. Maybe then we can have transcoding media streaming for the PS3 that works close to 100% of the time.

Until then though, PS3 Media Server will keep doing a really good job pushing my media to my home entertainment system, 1080p, 5.1 surround sound and all. And I’ll keep swearing at weird network errors, freezing video and crackling sound on the fairly few occasions those things happen.

Om du bryr dig om konsumentskydd, skriv på denna namninsamling

När datorbutiken.com gick i konkurs nyligen tog den med sig mängder av kunders pengar ner i det svarta konkurshålet och speciellt illa har det gått för de kunder som betalat för sina varor i förskott.

Efter att ha fått höra om hur vanligt folk blivit lurade på sina surt förvärvade slantar (som till exempel min polare Kentha, läs här) kan man inte bli annat än förbannad. Det är uppenbart att det har pågått fiffel och att kunderna förts bakom ljust på ett oschyst sätt. Har du betalat något i förskott och sedan inte får det du beställt är det inget annat än stöld.

För att förhindra att liknande händer igen krävs en lagändring. För att få igenom en sådan och skapa debatt runt det hela har en namninsamling som ska skickas till justitieminister Beatrice Ask upprättats.

Skriv på namninsamlingen här.

Och gör det nu är du snäll. Vänta inte. Nästa gång kan det vara du som blir blåst.

For the benefit of any international readers: This post is about a petition requesting a change of the Swedish consumer laws.

A new year, a new blog

I’ve slowly gotten the feeling that Google has abondoned Blogger and don’t give that much of a damn about it anymore. This on top of the fact that WordPress seems a whole lot sexier with its open sourciness (open sauciness? open sexiness?) and all that made me get a WordPress-account and move my stuff over here. So every post you see below this one is a post once written on my old blog over att Blogger (may it rest in peace).

I also decided that I’m gonna go bi-lingual with this blog. For the most part I’ll be writing in English, not to be snooty but because I think it’s a more expressive language and the fact that almost anybody in the world can read my messed up scribbles kinda excites me a little (tihi..), but I’ll also be writing in my mother-tongue, Swedish. The Swedish posts will be marked as such and will probably mainly contain brain-barfs of a smaller form that will only be of interest to someone more local to me. Call me pretentious but that’s the way I’m going with this.

Otherwise I’ll just be shooting my mouth (keyboard) on subjects that are near and dear to me, like tech, video games, movies, all manner of geek-stuff, wrestling, MMA and so on.

Happy new year.