Playstation 3 Media Server Setup

LEVEL 3: Connect to extra storage

This part is simple — just plug in your thumb drive or USB hard drive to any of the PS3’s USB ports. My 300GB Maxtor USB hard drive showed up as “USB Disk (One Touch II)” in the PS3’s video, photo, and music menus. When navigating a USB drive’s folders, use the PS3 menu corresponding to the type of media you’re looking for on the drive, or the files won’t show up.

USB Device Connected

External drives must be formatted with the FAT32 file system for the PS3 to read files on it. Formatting a drive erases all the data on it, so if your PS3 won’t read your drive, make sure to back up all data before you format.

Memory cards (Memory Stick, SD and its variants, or CompactFlash) go in the labeled slots under the door on the PS3’s front, and they don’t require specific formatting. ‘

Secret weapon: If you have a network-attached storage device (like an Apple Time Capsule with a 500GB hard drive in it), you can access it by mounting the drive on a networked computer. Then select your media server in the main PS3 window, and navigate to Folders – Volumes, and select the networked drive you want. Note that this doesn’t work with Windows Media Player’s UPnP server, but it works fine with TVersity (Windows) and MediaLink (Mac).

PS3 Accessing the Network Drive

LEVEL 4: Start watching and listening

Access your content by navigating to Photo, Video, or Music on the PS3’s home screen, and scroll until you see your computer or external drive. If you don’t see your computer’s media server listed, try selecting “Search for Media Servers” from any of the multimedia menus.

PS3 Codec Support

Video: MPG, MP4, AVI, DivX (except v3.11), AVCHD, WMV

Audio: WAV, MP3, AAC, ATRAC, WMA

Photo: JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, PNG

Not supported: Protected content, lossless audio formats (Apple Lossless, FLAC, etc.), RAW image files, or VOB movie files.