A comparison of PS3 and 360 as media players
- Thread starter TrungGap
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I'm atypical in that we change hardware frequently as my wife and I are both tech nerds. It started as a Core2Duo, then became a Q6000, now it's an overclocked 4.3ghz i7-2600k with a 580gtx. That's extreme overkill for most people if you just want a media pc though, I built it beefy because I use it as a render mule for my business and I play pc games on it as well, on top of media duties like watching blu-ray movies, doing skype calls back home, websurfing, etc... A single hdmi cable goes to my a/v receiver and it all works. Most here don't care about pc gaming so a $50 video card would be plenty. On the high end that would make it:
$315 Core i7-2600k, overlockable to ~4.3 - 4.8ghz on air cooling.
$159 Asus P8P67 Pro mobo
$50 video card
$50 ram
...and just reuse your case and hdd. But that's high end and way overkill for most, you can build a pc that will work for a fraction of that since the $50 video card will do all the video decoding anyways. A $200 machine (core2duo, 4gb ram, $50 video card) would work fine. Personally I'd spend more to be able to play pc games and you'll save that money back in no time anyways as pc games are cheaper than console games and look and run far better as a bonus.
PC's have sleep mode, they come out of that in a second or two, much faster than any console does powering up. In sleep mode they also use very little power. You can use hibernate mode if you prefer then they use zero power, but then they take 5 to 10 seconds to power up. With sleep mode the consoles have no hope of keeping pace, I can go from sleep mode to watching a blu-ray movie faster than it takes a PS3 to just power up and get to xmb. It's no contest, if it's speed you want then a console is the last thing you should be using.
Also, with a console often you have to keep a pc on all the time somewhere in the house to handle being a media server or transcoding duties. That's not necessary if you just use a pc to begin with. No need to transcode, it plays all formats natively and no need for a media server, the pc can play any file directly from hdd, raid, or whereever. You also don't have to worry about the media server software getting messed up, network connections, dropped connections, etc, all problems that happen when trying to use a console that depends on media server software running on a pc. None of those issues are an issue if you just use a pc to begin with.
Remotes do work, the remote that came with my 360 works fine, and the 360 gamepad works fine as well but I don't use them for the most part. I have a bluetooth mouse and keyboard that I use from the couch, but by and large the mouse is all you need and I leave the keyboard stored away in the coffee table. Simply come out of sleep mode, launch whatever app you want and go.
I putzd around with the consoles like you guys did ages ago and gave up when I realized they will always be crappy media players due to their respective makers wanting to protect their investments (online movie streaming, bluray discs, etc...), so they have built in obsolescence that will never change. Hence I switched to pc and never looked back. It's just fascinating to me to watch the continued trials and tribulations over many years of people still trying to get consoles to properly play media, when a pc has been doing it flawlessly for ages now.
Unless this is all more about the exercise of seeing if it's possible to circumvent all the blocks the console makers put in to make it not possible to have them be play-all media servers? In that case I get it if it's just from a hobbyist point of view to see if eventually if can be possible. I guess I kind of lost interest in that sometime ago,and I just want something that works all the time, hence pc.
Just buy Llano. You won't need a discrete video card then.
All files except one played smooth for me when streaming from media server, no conversion taking place. Did you really copy the files to the PS3 HDD?
For the most part true, though Llano is a tad underpowered to fully support the postprocessing capabilities that are possible on even AMD's low-end discrete cards. This won't be an issue for most people, but it is a consideration.
A basic cheap pc does not solve my "problems". Using my spare core macbook pro in either bootcamp or natively is (was) in no way as simple as you make it sound as if NO tweaks are required on PC's or Mac's come on bro...even using my expensive harmony remote requires a tweak (I do have a dinovo mini), gamma, overscan, noise, external hdd's. I've gone through my reasons with mrcorbo in PM already and as much as I wanted jriver and the likes to blow me away, for the way we consume media in my household why WOULDN'T we use the consoles that are already here. I'm done with external storage and housing shit we might watch once or twice more that is probably already on Netflix in Instant. Speaking of Netflix since I recently swapped out our laptops hdds for ssd's the wife and I got the lovely Netflix DRM error where I had to drop into Library and delete a file on each of our machines.
I posted my setup in the show us your gaming setup thread on neogaf, that''s all the space I have on that rack (actually the old Core Duo mbp sits atop the BD player). So, if you can find me a PC that is no louder than when my projector is on High lamp and works with my Harmony and is sub-$500 I'll take a look at it but it needs to fit in my setup since there is only one TV in our home and that's in my sons room and it's a tiny 26" LCD so the PC would need to be on the component rack for the projector.
I could go into detail about how many years I spent with an HTPC but I won't. I'm sure many things have gotten better but the idea that you simply plug the PC into your display and you are set...I haven't experienced that in the past nor in my most recent attempts. PC gaming hasn't interested me since Rise of Nations and Age of Mythology and gaming in general is such a distant second compared to video for our family. I don't mind what we pay for tv shows in zune video marketplace I do care that the service is ridiculously slow but I don't know if its the CDN or ISP or what. THAT is the only reason why I began to even entertain going back to an HTPC not "pc gaming" not downloaded or ripped videos but speed - when I press play I don't want to see spinning rings for minutes (not hyperbole) - I want the file to play, but, am I willing to drop hundreds of dollars for that...I don't know...
I posted my setup in the show us your gaming setup thread on neogaf, that''s all the space I have on that rack (actually the old Core Duo mbp sits atop the BD player). So, if you can find me a PC that is no louder than when my projector is on High lamp and works with my Harmony and is sub-$500 I'll take a look at it but it needs to fit in my setup since there is only one TV in our home and that's in my sons room and it's a tiny 26" LCD so the PC would need to be on the component rack for the projector.
I could go into detail about how many years I spent with an HTPC but I won't. I'm sure many things have gotten better but the idea that you simply plug the PC into your display and you are set...I haven't experienced that in the past nor in my most recent attempts. PC gaming hasn't interested me since Rise of Nations and Age of Mythology and gaming in general is such a distant second compared to video for our family. I don't mind what we pay for tv shows in zune video marketplace I do care that the service is ridiculously slow but I don't know if its the CDN or ISP or what. THAT is the only reason why I began to even entertain going back to an HTPC not "pc gaming" not downloaded or ripped videos but speed - when I press play I don't want to see spinning rings for minutes (not hyperbole) - I want the file to play, but, am I willing to drop hundreds of dollars for that...I don't know...
Maybe I've been lucky but I've had no issues whatsoever. Maybe it's because you ran it on a macbook with bootcamp? I had a macbook for a while and bootcamp was a bit flakey on it although I've since sold it. Owning the macbook with bootcamp was actually quite eye opening. It made me realize why mac folk think Win7 isn't reliable. It's because it isn't...on bootcamp. A bootcamp Win7 experience at least to me was different than a proper Win7 experience.
Overscan is cake to deal with, drivers let you set the screen size, I set mine to fit my plasma tv exactly so I have no overscan. If you don't play games on the pc then you never need to update your video drivers, so set overscan once and that's it, never touch it again. I don't know about external hdd's, we have everything on ~12tb raid in another part of the house so that's never been an issue on our end either, but if you do have to use external hdd's presumably that would be an issue with consoles as well. I don't know much about harmony remotes, never used one, but media center remotes work fine although I stick with mouse.
Ah sounds like our needs are polar opposites. I never use netflix, I only use stored media whereas it looks like what you need is the best possible netflix player as you don't deal with stored media. I've never tried netflix so don't know much about it to comment.
That's actually very easy to do, even easier if you have a Frys near you. They have many tiny pc cases available, and there are lots of fanless gpu's to choose from nowadays that cost as low as $20 and can decode all video, even full hd. You could probably build a small and quiet htpc for somewhat less than $500 since you don't pc game. I don't know about harmony remotes at all though, can't comment on that.
Interesting, I've been the opposite but maybe it's because I built all my Win7 machines as I do remember my macbook on bootcamp having issues like random crashes, video drivers issues, etc. The current htpc I built is the best yet, literally plugged it in, installed windows and apps, and that's it haven't tweaked one thing on it yet aside from overclocking it on day one right on the first boot. Runs like a champ. I'm actually remote desktop'd into it right now giving it a new render task, it's been rendering videos non stop for the past few weeks poor thing
I guess if I had your frustration with htpc's then I'd agree but my experience has been pretty good, no issues here and no going back. Now with consoles well, that's a different story. Having them play one mp4 file then refuse to play another mp4 file with no indication as to why was brutally frustrating and quite tedious to deal with when I had a room full of family waiting to watch a home video. Gave up on that so now I don't look like a tech goofball anymore, all videos play. Personally I'm suspicious of your macbook being the culprit here just because of the issues I had with mine, but who knows I guess.
It was the 002 file I had been testing. It's choppy. Tonight I copied the rest and they played fine. Quite strange. Also the clip with the industry people speaking had the occasional glitch.
It'd seem like there is something about file 002 the PS3 doesn't like. That's ok. The last 2 files have been my favorite anyway. Thanks for your help in troubleshooting!
During playback, you can hit ^ and select the "i+" icon to show movie properties. I heard a few BR movies hit or exceed 40Mbps in certain scenes.
For HTPC issues, it may be driver related. Or may be corrupted config. Happened to me before. Had to reinstall or update driver. But overall, I think it's still easier (albeit tedious) to fix than mysterious video issues.
My solution was just to stick to standard formats with average profiles. ^_^
Paying for NetFlix, Hulu, Vudu or PSN videos are fine solution too. Don't forget the limited but free selection on crackle.com.
For HTPC issues, it may be driver related. Or may be corrupted config. Happened to me before. Had to reinstall or update driver. But overall, I think it's still easier (albeit tedious) to fix than mysterious video issues.
My solution was just to stick to standard formats with average profiles. ^_^
Paying for NetFlix, Hulu, Vudu or PSN videos are fine solution too. Don't forget the limited but free selection on crackle.com.
@ joker454 - For the record, Harmonys work great with the MCE remote's IR receiver. Also, you should get one. You'll be glad you did. You can go from having the entire system turned off to Live TV or Movies in Windows Media Center 7 with a single button press (and visa-versa), no matter what the last used source was.
Yeah PC will work, but getting the colour right, the contrast right, the frame rate right is quite troublesome. I use PC as last resort when everything failed, just because picture quality is quite troublesome on PC. Dedicated blu-ray runs things better outright compare to PC. PS3 also runs the files that it can run very well compare to PC.
Windows Media Center has a very easy display setup wizard that walks you through the process of getting correct settings for color, contrast, etc. Not sure what your on about WRT frame rate. My PC will play 24p,25p,30p,50i/p,60i/p. Can your PS3 handle all of those? Dedicated BluRay players do NOT run things better than any recent vintage PC and the PS3 doesn't run files any where near as well as any recent vintage PC, even one with modest specs.
On the PS3, just press the 'select' button.
Where do you get 60i/p video files
How do you define "run files....well"?
I don't ever think there should be an argument on whether a PC can handle more file types and handle them better than the consoles, ever, however straight out of the box? Joker glosses over the additional applications that need to be installed to allow for his stored content to work hell there are still no DVD codecs in the low-end Windows 7 versions. I have an MSDN subscription so that doesn't bother me but I don't think he made the case for "no tweaks" that he believes he did. If me dropping into my drivers to set my overscan is not a tweak and installing perian or some other such codec pack is not a tweak then I believe we need to standardize on some terminology if we really want to move forward in this discussion.
The other thing that seems to fly directly over some heads is the idea that some of us NEED to be able to play multiple file types. I'm not on newsgroups downloading wmv, mkv, avi or the bevy of other video file types I'm in Zune Marketplace, I'm in VUDU, I'm in Netflix, I let THEM handle the file type I simply click buy or play; I let Microsoft and VUDU be my cloud storage for my video purchases. I prefer Games on Demand to physical discs for games and it goes beyond simple convenience. I find nothing aesthetically pleasing about shelves full of games and movies since I'm not a retail store and while I have space I prefer not to dedicate to those items the same goes for books, it is the CONTENT I want the container doesn't interest me so much except when it infringes upon another desire.
EDIT: running out the door but I have more to say
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Where do you get 60i/p video files
Did you really not understand that I was trying to avoid writing, "50i,50p,60i,60p"? Have you not seen the "/" symbol used between two items to indicate this or that?
Based on the context of the post I was responding to, I define it as supporting all of the features of the file containers it handles (multiple streams, chapters, subtitles), having better performance (especially when seeking) and having better image quality. What's your definition?
In what way? What type(s) of media? Same display used for both?
So what you are meaning are 60 fps interlaced and progressive video files? Do you really know what those are?
Ok you list three features for supported formats (containers and codecs).
1: File container features: What is it that the PS3 media player cannot do that other media players do?
2: I have never had any problems seeking with the PS3 media player. Regarding performance, there does not seem to be any problems playing DF's 60 fps 720p videos. Do you have access to any 1080p 60fps videos that we can test?
3: If the image different media player spits out differ differ, one (or both) of them is faulty. Image quality (vibrancy of colors, black levels, no ghosting etc) comes from the display, and a video player decodes the images and send them to the display.
why wouldnt the PS3 play pretty much any framerate <=60?
Question is, does your PC switch resolution to 24, 25 Hz when playing movies so able TVs can do the best to display them judder-free (or upconvert to 100/200 Hz)? And how much work is it to get all codecs for Window Media Center and configuring it for stuff like that (doesnt play more than a PS3 ootb)
What codec are you using for mkv for example? if you use the divx one its a mess that sucks up all available memory, if you use ffdshow that means no media foundation functionality (no mkv files when you host a dnla server via WMP)
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