How so? I use Media Center with my cable, it records while I play games. It doesn't use much resources to do so, has little to no effect on gaming.I have setup a Windows Media Center with my DirectTV. Using my 360 as a media extender, it's working pretty well, but still not very happy with it. Mainly because it's the same PC that I play game with.So, I need to setup a dedicated PC for Media Center.
A comparison of PS3 and 360 as media players
- Thread starter TrungGap
- Start date
I like using my xbox 360 with wmp 11 and not with the media center. It seems to play all I want. I find the ps3 to be a bit harder to use. The naruto and bleach eps i watch need to be re encoded to play on it and I don't like how burried everything is in the menu options.
Thats about as much as I can add to the conversation.
Thats about as much as I can add to the conversation.
You just hit 'square' to get it.
It's one of those things that baffled me, though. I got my PSP several months after my PS3, and the PSP had that feature already. Not to mention how the UI for playing videos on the PS3 seems to be slightly different depending on whether you're playing a file, a DVD or a BRD.
I have a dedicated Vista Media center with 2 cable card and 2 OTA HD capture cards. I can watch my recorded shows in the living room or the bed room, or my wife can watch her shows and I can play games in the other room. This plus Netflix (was not impressed with PlayOn quality), a real remote, and cheaper price make the 360 my standard media player. A big plus to the extender (WAF) is it's a nice interface that you can get to with one click from the remote, that has a media centric interface.
The PS3's main plus is BluRay playing, but lack of IR and WMA lossless support are pretty big missing points, a death blow for my music which a majority is WMA lossless.
I'm not happy with the way either handles ISOs or VOBs, and I have no interest in transcoding movies, so DivX/XVid support is useless for me. Both machines are horrendously loud and I keep missing features that XBMC had some 4 years ago.
I would not recommend either device to anyone as just a media player.
The PS3's main plus is BluRay playing, but lack of IR and WMA lossless support are pretty big missing points, a death blow for my music which a majority is WMA lossless.
I'm not happy with the way either handles ISOs or VOBs, and I have no interest in transcoding movies, so DivX/XVid support is useless for me. Both machines are horrendously loud and I keep missing features that XBMC had some 4 years ago.
I would not recommend either device to anyone as just a media player.
I have settled on only standard formats (No MS or Apple-specific stuff). My use cases are:
* Blu-ray, DVD and downloaded movie viewing
* Home videos, photos viewing
* Listening to music with and without slideshows
* Watch YouTube occasionally
Office PS3:
* PS3 with 500Gb SATA
Home PS3:
* PS3 with 500Gb DLNA Server (Twonky Media NAS box, and still looking for a Windows-based PC for transcoding)
They both work very well for what I want ( the upscaling). The Office PS3 is snappier because everything is now local. HD video is not a problem too.
Still have not set up RemotePlay for my Home PS3. Was waiting for something like PlayTV for US but looks like it's not going to be here in the near term.
* Blu-ray, DVD and downloaded movie viewing
* Home videos, photos viewing
* Listening to music with and without slideshows
* Watch YouTube occasionally
Office PS3:
* PS3 with 500Gb SATA
Home PS3:
* PS3 with 500Gb DLNA Server (Twonky Media NAS box, and still looking for a Windows-based PC for transcoding)
They both work very well for what I want (
the upscaling). The Office PS3 is snappier because everything is now local. HD video is not a problem too.Still have not set up RemotePlay for my Home PS3. Was waiting for something like PlayTV for US but looks like it's not going to be here in the near term.
It's not noisy at all for me because the DVD doesnt spin.
mkv2vob and mkv2avi
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=131782
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=142422
Are 2 utillities that can be used to convert MKV files into something the PS3 plays back.
Use http://tversity.com/ as a media server.
I have only tested mkv2vob and it seems to work pretty nice, apparently it will re encode files that contains formats the PS3 doesn´t like.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=131782
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=142422
Are 2 utillities that can be used to convert MKV files into something the PS3 plays back.
Use http://tversity.com/ as a media server.
I have only tested mkv2vob and it seems to work pretty nice, apparently it will re encode files that contains formats the PS3 doesn´t like.
I'm not talking about the DVD, I'm referring to the noisy fan system it uses. IMO if you can here the media player than it's too noisy. HTPC people know this well, there is a large industry just to make PCs silent.
There are two generations of 360 fans. The latter ones are pretty much silent and do not hamper the movie viewing experience. I think this is why there is disagreement and confusion on this matter.
I doubt that, I had a launch premium and now have a Falcon Elite, they sound the same. I've read nothing about a change in fan design or noise. Anandtech also didn't mention it in their dissection of the Jasper.
http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3472&p=5
My 360 Elite is actually quieter than my PS3, when the disk is not spinning. My launch 360 is louder than the Elite, but not that bad.
My nephew keeps both 360 and PS3 in a cabinet. And the PS3 is actually louder than 360 (launch unit), when no disk spinning. And the PS3 produced enough heat that he had to removed back panel to give it air circulation.
Now, with disk spinning, my launch 360 is loud...like a jet taking off. PS3 get a little louder, but manageable (I sit 1 foot away from 360 and PS3 -- PS3 stacked on 360s). The Elite is still lot louder than PS3 (with disk spinning).
So much of the loudness of the 360 is from the DVD drive not from the fan. However, when I play DVD on 360, it's relatively quiet. Though I don't do that often...since PS3 up convert the DVD much better than 360.
The loudness is a small part of it, the older PS3s did get loud after they heated up. More importantly (to me and I assume some others), the PS3 fan noise is more or less white, while the 360 dual fan design hums with a irritating frequency, which I assume is sound of the acoustic beats. I've recently traded in my launch 60GB for a new 80GB, so the sound of the PS3 is almost non-existent, but at least still white and soothing.
thatdude90210
Regular
My replacement 360 from MS, new as far as I can tell (build 9/2008) that I got a few weeks ago, has an annoying whine. It's not that loud, but yet enough to bug me when watching movies. It's like a mild version of the old Delta fan whine.
Getting a quieter 360 seems to be a hit and miss thing. On the other hand, this newer 360 runs much cooler than couple of my earlier ones. It's cool to the touch, and the air coming out the back is merely warm. Whereas the launch unit was hot on top, and had some really hot air coming out the back.
Getting a quieter 360 seems to be a hit and miss thing. On the other hand, this newer 360 runs much cooler than couple of my earlier ones. It's cool to the touch, and the air coming out the back is merely warm. Whereas the launch unit was hot on top, and had some really hot air coming out the back.
Lucid_Dreamer
Veteran
It shouldn't use much resources, right? Isn't the PC doing the work?
Recording of a broadcast stream should just involve writing it to HDD, at very little overhead. A poor implementation would be decoding the stream as it comes in and then saving as a different format.
I guess in this case the PC isn't multitasking very well, with perhaps the games clashing with HDD access alongside the recorder? What would solve that is 16GBs of Flash card in a port with the recorder directed to write to that!
I guess in this case the PC isn't multitasking very well, with perhaps the games clashing with HDD access alongside the recorder? What would solve that is 16GBs of Flash card in a port with the recorder directed to write to that!
Well, I suppose you have a point - piracy is pretty mainstream these days too after all. That said, I've yet to encounter a MKV file that I couldn't remux to play on PS3 (no transcoding involved).tongue_of_colicab said:
I personally never understood the whole 'container' fanboy mentality anyway, when MKV first appeared most video distributed on internet was in AVI containers (and a tiny bit in OGG), MKV playback was buggy as hell on every platform known to man, yet people put up with the shit and kept encoding things in MKV against all better judgement.
Spending 20seconds remuxing a HD video to a different container so a console can play it is a walk in the park compared to the issues that accompanied rise of MKV and certain other open-source video related stuff.
That said, I pretty much expect that when(if) MKV becomes part of DIVX spec(it's been rumoured, I wouldn't know for sure), some other open-source container format will appear to take its place over few more years of frustration to everyone using it.
But not to go off topic here, personally I've found PS3 to be refreshingly stable as a media platform, something that I've never experienced with any PC based solutions I've used over the (many) years to date. If I wasn't using a LinkSys router at the moment(which is terribly unstable with well, just about everything, including PS3 Media server connection), I'd hardly have any complaints.
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Welcome to the future. some core(s) dedicated to media tasks and some cores for the game. RAm, HDD perfomance, standard.. more than enough, no problem.
It's like PlayTV on the PS3 - that process manages to record to HDD also using just the OS reserved SPE apparently, and very few games seem to manage to make a dent on the recording process.
When it comes to playing back downloaded video I'm not so experienced - I don't like stealing and generally we just buy a lot of DVDs (tv-series for the bang-for-buck win) or watch movie channels.
However, we did test it the other day (wanted my wife to see a certain old movie and thought to experiment with downloading one since they can be hard to track in a rental place, as well as the first episode of a series that isn't broadcast in Europe yet) and both movies worked and could be streamed from the PC simply through DNLA on the Windows Media Player.
When it comes to subtitles, the way I understood it is that neither console can deal with video that has the subtitles in a separate file (in the container I presume), so that's probably the biggest issue in that regard. I read somewhere that the PS3 supports multiple audio tracks in video files which I'm not sure the 360 does yet? (these things change really fast)
Maybe we should set up a batch of test video containers that we can periodically test the consoles against to figure out what they can do and whether that changes over time.
When it comes to playing back downloaded video I'm not so experienced - I don't like stealing and generally we just buy a lot of DVDs (tv-series for the bang-for-buck win) or watch movie channels.
However, we did test it the other day (wanted my wife to see a certain old movie and thought to experiment with downloading one since they can be hard to track in a rental place, as well as the first episode of a series that isn't broadcast in Europe yet) and both movies worked and could be streamed from the PC simply through DNLA on the Windows Media Player.
When it comes to subtitles, the way I understood it is that neither console can deal with video that has the subtitles in a separate file (in the container I presume), so that's probably the biggest issue in that regard. I read somewhere that the PS3 supports multiple audio tracks in video files which I'm not sure the 360 does yet? (these things change really fast)
Maybe we should set up a batch of test video containers that we can periodically test the consoles against to figure out what they can do and whether that changes over time.
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