What's the best way to turn PS3 into music player (with visualizations)?

June 27, 2009 12:42 PM

Best way to turn PS3 into music player (with visualizations)?

I want to set my PS3 up to play music files (FLAC and MP3), because I'm not happy with the built in Media Player. Are there any guides out there for installing Linux on a PS3 to get it to act as a media center? I don't care about watching tv on it, which most of the guides I've found seem to center on. Basically, I just need a nice GUI to be able to browse through albums by tags and a nice visual player would be great too. The Visual Players included with the PS3 got old quick, and unfortunately you can't add more...

posted by idyllhands to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: You can install Unix/Linux on it, but it is not for the faint of heart.

Here is a somewhat old, but still perfectly valid tutorial on getting Ubuntu up and running on the PS3.

Yellow Dog Linux probably has the best hardware support for the PS3.

Repartitioning your drive to support -nix will erase your profile and all of your saved games, demos, etc, so be sure to back them up before doing it.

Once you have one of the above up and running you can download the player of your choice. However since the system memory is limited (256 meg) and there's no support for graphics acceleration (afaik) performance may be much less than you're expecting.
posted by Ookseer at 1:03 PM on June 27, 2009

YDL is definitely a solid choice for a PS3 Linux base, and VLC (which has visualizations) actually works pretty well on it.

However, backing up your system, kick-starting Open Platform, cranking through a Linux install and restoring your saved games & profile info may not be worth the effort just to have a better media center experience.
posted by hrbrmstr at 2:17 PM on June 27, 2009

I've done the Linux install. Getting it up and running isn't that difficult. The frustrating part is all the tweaking you'll have to do just to get it to be somewhat useful, and even then the hardware is very limiting because you won't have access to the graphics chip. Yellow Dog's PS3 Forum will be useful to you if you'd like to try it.
posted by TrialByMedia at 6:47 PM on June 27, 2009