Will my PS3 play nice with a networked hard drive?

December 22, 2008 7:36 PM

How to use wifi, a PS3, and external hard drives to stream media to the tv?

I've got a PS3, and recently set up a wifi connection at home. I'm thinking about getting one a networked hard drive (the kind you connect to your wifi router) so that my wife (using her netbook) and I (using my toshiba laptop) can access photos, music, whathaveyou wirelessly. I'd also like to set it up so that my PS3 can play videos from that hard drive.

I asked a guy at Yodobashi Camera if this was doable with a Buffalo network harddrive like this one (the product name is slightly different in Japan), and he said he didn't think it would work. I'm hesistant to drop about $150 on one of these things if it won't work with the PS3.

I guess, to take this to its natural extension, is the PS3 (with aforementioned HD) a decent stopgap for a media center? Or should I just continue to hook my laptop up to the tv when I want to watch videos?

posted by Ghidorah to technology (17 comments total)

I don't think the PS3 would be able to access the external hard drive through Wifi, but you can certainly hook it up to the PS3 via USB and still access the drive wirelessly from your laptops.
posted by roomwithaview at 8:02 PM on December 22, 2008

What roomwithaview said, although the hard drive needs to be formatted as Fat32. NTFS won't work.
Personally I use external usb drives connected to my PC, and stream wirelessly to the PS3 with either , or my new crush, .
posted by Duke999R at 8:15 PM on December 22, 2008

Oh crap.

http://tversity.com/

http://ps3mediaserver.blogspot.com/

BTW I have both running on my machine at the same time for comparison, without any conflict.
posted by Duke999R at 8:17 PM on December 22, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

If you're using Windows Media Player--stop laughing--you can configure it to share media in your library with your PS3.
posted by sevenless at 8:30 PM on December 22, 2008

I have streamed just about everything to the PS3 and while it's finicky about things like chapter markers, I've been happy streaming from an Infrant/Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ running TwonkyMedia - which also runs on a wide variety of hardware, including Buffalo drives (I believe) and desktop OSes.
posted by kcm at 8:37 PM on December 22, 2008

If you can access the files on your PC through Windows Explorer, you can stream them to your PC wirelessly. I second TVersity as your media server as it'll convert and play many of the video formats that the PS3 dosen't have native support for on the fly.
posted by Effigy2000 at 8:38 PM on December 22, 2008

roomwithaview, a question. Hooking it up by USB, then being able to access it, would that mean having the HD attached via LAN to the router, then having the USB connection to the PS3? So, uh, that means it would have to be very wired, rather than wireless? D'oh. Thanks.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:38 PM on December 22, 2008

I'm pretty sure he means connecting it straight into one of the PS3s USB ports. The XMB would then recognise the drive (displayed and accessable under the Video menu) and you could play files direct to the PS3 that way.
posted by Effigy2000 at 8:49 PM on December 22, 2008

Googling, people assert that that Buffalo NAS will communicate with a PS3.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:11 PM on December 22, 2008

If the server is streaming to the PS3 over DLNA, it doesn't matter, AFAIK, how the HD is formatted.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:12 PM on December 22, 2008

We have an Infrant (now Netgear) ReadyNAS NV and a PS3 on our wifi network. We don't use any external software solutions, just the latest firmware updates on both, and the PS3 is able to see all the files on the ReadyNAS. However, we find that wifi is not really fast or reliable enough to stream movies, so we browse through the NAS, copy the movie onto the PS3 hard drive and then watch it from there.
posted by Joh at 10:10 PM on December 22, 2008

Thanks for all the help. Not sure just yet what I'll do, but it's good to know the hard drive would work with the PS3.
posted by Ghidorah at 2:06 AM on December 23, 2008

I have a Linkstation Pro Duo and a PS3 and haven't had a whole lot of luck getting this to work, but my wireless network seems to be kind of flaky.

It looks like this should be supported, but some people have problems and Buffalo has been promising a fix for a couple months but so far the fix has yet to surface.
posted by curse at 9:28 AM on December 23, 2008

I have a netgear something something, and for a while, I was running my PS3 just off of the wifi, but recently it started to get a bit odd, so while my computer is still running off of wifi, I'm using LAN cable for the PS3.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:14 PM on December 23, 2008

roomwithaview, a question. Hooking it up by USB, then being able to access it, would that mean having the HD attached via LAN to the router, then having the USB connection to the PS3? So, uh, that means it would have to be very wired, rather than wireless? D'oh. Thanks.

I envisioned something like this:

Wifi-enabled NAS connected to PS3 via USB cord.
Laptops access the NAS wirelessly via Wifi.

If you had the Buffalo or whichever NAS that the PS3 can access directly through Wifi then you could forgo the USB connection, but as someone else mentioned, network speeds might not let you stream media very well.

The other option, as others have mentioned, is to use your computer as a media server (acting as the middleman between PS3 and hard drive).
posted by roomwithaview at 12:18 PM on December 24, 2008

In the end, I've got my PS3 connected via LAN to my wireless router. I've got the NAS harddrive connected to the same. My computer is occasionally connect via LAN when I'm doing heavy lifting (torrenting/transfering files to the HD), otherwise, I use the wireless connection.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:36 AM on January 22

Damn. I hit enter, and instead of a paragraph break, I get a published comment... Anyway, last thing, when I've got my lappy connected via LAN, it tends to slow down my connectivity to the PSN, giving me 2 or 3 bars, rather than the full 5. When I've got my laptop on wifi, and not torrenting, there's no effect on the PSN connection.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:38 AM on January 22