are people working on a ps3 media center OS?

I'd pay for one that could do Windows Media Player, Quicktime and Flash in a heartbeat. I have that mlb.tv subscription. I'd love to be able to have it on the TV without hooking up my laptop.

I would gladly pay for either a Media Center like "GAME" that you could run or an extension to XMB that would play vob's mp3, mpg avi etc etc from network shares or nas boxes.

Most of the Linux stuff right now seems to be focused on getting the compilers and drivers sorted out. Last week there was more talk of some kind of RSX access being available to Linux later this year and there is work on an improved sound driver. Once all that stuff gets in place we should be better off.

Ubuntu is going to be releasing a PS3 version of their OS in April. I tried the Feisty Fawn beta from Mar 22 but I didn't like it as much as Gentoo. But it did have a nearly one-click installer that made getting the PS3 running Linux a breeze. Unfortunately there were some bugs though.

Sony is in the works to introduce VOD, and Music trough PSN.

They need to make it a MCE extender. MS licenses this technology out to other companies so its not like they could prevent Sony from doing it.

There are over 40M MCE owners and now most versions of Vista support it.

LOL there is not even a slightly remote chance that would ever happen EVER. Sony get a liscense form MS for MCE. Please don't take any offense but not sure how you think that would even be plausible in the business side of things.

They don't!

IMO - Sony should stay away from anything M$. Just my thought. I like them to focus on the open source a lot more, than closed off M$ systems...

The xbox 360 has extender capabilities. Just try to play a dvd over the network! ERROR! ERROR! Or ts files. What a joke. Microsoft could have made oodles of money off of HTPC fans who don't want the hassle of a full-blown HTPC. Nope. Too scared I'll broadcast my dvds over the internet somehow. I agree that Sony will never go with MCE capability, and that's a good thing.

Whats the difference when it comes to Sony Vaio and Windows OS?

I pray they can get Linux drivers sorted out and get XBMC like functionality in it (plus 1080i/p HD streaming of course).

I don't have any hope for Sony at this point. With no basic network streaming accross the board, that's a strong message. They want to be in this space even less than Microsoft, who really pissed me off at launch when they required XP MCE for video but allowed regular installs to handle music and pictures.

Magic 8 Ball says, "You are in denial, there's a HTPC in Your Future"

Please - no MS or MCE extensions

Just give us the ability to have a better network-aware UI-based media playback app or alternative front-end. With support for all the common codecs (which already seems to built into the OS)!

I bet (hope?) with the video walls and media playback capability in the upcoming Home product, hey may release ancillary external standalone player apps as well!

Sony will never do it because it runs counter to the PS3 mission.
PS3 is supposed to be a standalone Media Center PC in its own right, not merely a remote terminal to a Media Center PC.
The whole Cell-as-a-media-processor thing is intended to get japanese CE companies out of their dependence on Wintel tech by building up a Cell/Linux alternate platform for local media apps, DVR, and IPTV.

As things look, it will be sometime in 2008 before PS3 LINUX can host a full HTPC environment on PS3 but it will happen.

The other stuff, especially IPTV, is further out; Sony, Panasonic, et al just recently banded together to draft specifications for future products to compete with the Microsoft/Alcatel alliance.

http://panasonic.broadcastnewsroom.c....jsp?id=116254

Making PS3 PC-independent is a strategic imperative at Sony and tying it to *any* MS products (WMP, MCE, or the upcoming Home Server boxes) will only happen as a last resort, when everthing else has failed.

Of course, that doesn't mean somebody can't provide their own homebrew UPnP client, but that's as far as its likely to go...

So if they are so opposed to Microsoft, why did they buckle and provide WMA support? Because not everyone wants Sony's ATRAC crap. I think people are generally tired of all the competing formats in music files, video files, etc. Nothing pisses me off more than having a hard drive full of files and having to convert them to use with a certain product, or having the product try and convert them all for you. All my hard drives are NTFS formatted, because that's what I need for large files. What does Sony have the wisdom to support? FAT32 file formatted hard drives. I'm NOT going to reformat my hard drives and copy info and lose info just so it can work with Sony's lack of vision. How hard is it to support multiple hard drive file systems? NOT very hard at all. But does Sony care? Obviously not. Now usb keyboard support is all fuggled up backing out of a game, and does Sony care? Nope. I wish, I wish that Sony could be the HTPC that I already have. I just don't think that they will, and if they do the formats will be very specific and like the 360, the capabilities will be hampered by lawyers and movie companies. Sony will push and push their competing formats over the other ones, not thinking that some people don't want to constantly switch back and forth. It's about convenience, right? Having all your stuff available for you to listen to or watch. Well, converting files endlessly between formats is NOT convenient. I'll just throw the damn disc in a standalone player before I go through all that pain.

Kudos to you my friend !! One of the best posts in this matter in this thread. People are so naive and think that the companies have our convenience and preference in mind when developing features. For the PS3 crowd, MS is evil and must be avoided at all costs, where as for the Xbox crowd, Sony is the devil and the PS3 is evil spawn.

The real evil lies in the MPAA and RIAA board rooms, and as long as they are filled with paranoid panzies, CE products will continue to be hobbled in their functionality and focus on consumer convenience.

Wow!
That's a big list...

Well, companies (be they Sony, MS, Apple, whatever...) have priorities.
First priority is making money.
Second priority is making sure they can continue to make money in the future.
Third priority.... you get the idea.
What companies work on at any given point in time and what they will support in *any* product is a function of their long-term strategies, their business model (how they expect to make money), and what the competition looks like in a given area. One obvious example: MS puts a lot of effort and resources into XBOX Live, probably more than Sony on PSN. Why? Cause MS charges for LIVE. It has to justify the cost. Sony doesn't charge for PSN so they have to either make up the costs elsewhere or avoid spending the money in the first place. Doesn't mean one way is necessarily better; just different.
But the bills have to be paid for out of one pocket or another; TINSTAAFL!

Now, WMA support? Well, MP3 alone won't hack it and a lot of people use it; certainly a lot more than ATRAC.
Fat32? While MS may have originated it on PCs, it is a standard file system on thumb-drives and external drives. Like it or not, they *have* to support it.
These are costs they can't avoid.
Supporting alternate file systems, like NTFS, however, are avoidable. So they avoid them because the numbers don't add up; the benefits of supporting them don't justify the costs. Not when there are other uses of their inhouse resources that can result in more (and more immediate) sales.
Suporting MCE falls under the category of "yes, there are 40 million MCE boxes out there but we'd rather them replace the MCE box with a PS3 than see them use them in tandem". And apparently, when Sony crunched the numbers the cost of licensing the MCE protocols and the damage to their long-term agenda, outweighed the extra sales they might make, so they decided to do without MCE support. If at some point the whole MCE-terminal business explodes (there are TVs coming with built-in MCE extender features) then the numbers will change. But until then...

Its all about what helps sell PS3s and other Sony gear.

I bought a SONY mp3 player last year to listen to books off the web at work. Of course, I assumed it was an mp3 player. IT was an ATRAC player. Hilarious! IT went back the same day to Best Buy and I purchased a cheaper player that plays mp3s. Honestly, off all the stupid business decisions. I wonder how well that player is selling today with it's limited support? Hell, I think the PS3 focuses more on Blue Ray discs than on games so Sony can get it's little format out there. The PS2 was supposed be a digital media hub and that never happened, either. So far, the PS3 is just a glorified PSP media-wise.

I hope somebody is working on it under Linux at least. Xbox Media Center shows that people working on it as hobbyists can do a better job than a corporation. There would be more codec support, more flexibility, more customization, you name it.

Unless Sony goes after those homebrew people with a lawyer. Hell, they seem to have taken steps to prevent companies from making a useable 3rd party controller. Or anything for that matter.

Uh, neither does the 360.
USB-attached storage needs to be FAT32 too.
I have 2.5" USB drives both on my box and on my mother's.
No biggie. Works like a charm.

Who said anything about the 360?

The 360 can do whatever it wants. It already showed us it's not a true Media Center with it's refusal to stream dvds over the network whether it's from a hard drive or whatever. My HTPC using Windows Media Center does it. But not the 360. Whatever. Nobody's saying "support NTFS and NOT FAT 32". Any PC supports both formats and a 3rd as far as I know. The PS3 is supposed to take the place of my media pc, yet it won't support the most useful file system? That's bogus. Some Sony rep said the PS3 is more about being a media hub than games. http://www.mygadgetinfo.com/playstat...-be-media-hub/ So far, I just don't see it. If it can't do simple things a PC can do, then it's not a media hub. Sony needs to either get on the ball or stop lying. I don't want a half-assed media center.

Anyone interested in the media capabilities is in the same boat and feels roughly the same way (unless of course a person has no experience with HTPC or any other media conduit/hub device on the market and never really gave it enough thought to think about proper logical implementations).

Bottom line, there's no network streaming. That's kind of essential in being a media "hub" unless one's idea is to live out of USB 2.0 externals hanging around the room being carried back and forth between the PC and the PS (how dumb is that). And it's not like network connectivity is a foreign concept with all the connectivity built in or that the idea of streaming or transfering something from a server or non-local storage is far out and something other than standard. This is not an inadvertent oversight. It's deliberately left out, someone would have answered for this obvious omission in first meeting regarding media playback.

I'm not solely knocking Sony but there's a massive drag on development with these types of devices from all vendors. This is by far the slowest, most limited, and seemingly purposely hobbled area of innovation in the PC/Tech world (devices on this theme have been trickling out for years now and oddly almost entirely from non-core CE oddball vendors and they still aren't anywhere near getting it right). They have XBMC and all the HTPC front-ends as perfect examples of what's desired and they've been at it for years now while the CE sectors plods along seemingly blind, deaf, and dumb beyond belief. No one is that stupid. This isn't an accident. Generally when stuff doesn't make sense, it's lawyers at work.

Hence I offer you my own fortune from above.

I agree with you whole heartedly.

He was knocking Sony for not supporting NTFS.
Well, MS created and owns NTFS and doesn't support it either.
I was defending sony.
But I guess I'd better just bug out...

When you are done with your posts here, e-mail Sony.
The more people that do this, the better chance we have.

Please.

http://www.us.playstation.com/Corpor...nsumerServices

I bought the PS3 for bluray and hoping for a networked media player. I knew it was not in the first firmware but hoped they would add it. I agree with the comment that the fact that we can't see network shares on a pc or NAS drive was done on purpose. Maybe to sell us something downstream from sony. I have also tried using the Linkplayer2 which streams media from various devices. For some things it works pretty well, the UI is very bad and it takes a long time to browse through folder looking for the movie I want to play. There are a lot of networked media devices and almost all of them fall short either on IFO DVD playback or inconsistent playback of mpeg, divx or some other codec. Sony had a chance to really take over the living room and blew it !

The fact that NTFS might cost a licensing fee does not bother me. I would pay for media center functionality if it was seemlessly integrated.

I agree. I would gladly pay for a media center program on the PS3 if it worked well. None of this half-assed stuff that the 360 offers. RT, you have a point: I did not know that Microsoft owns NTFS. I guess from a business competitive perspective, not supporting it makes sense. I don't know why you say they don't support it though. All my hard drives are formatted NTFS to allow large file size. Of course, they came from the factory FAT32 but that was easily remedied. So who owns Fat32?