New Update

Hi folks,

After some review of the current program I decided to do some updates to the interface, as well as refinements....

A lot of the time spent was trying to figure out how to get flash to communicate with the PS3 media server, this component is almost there and as a result there is now a new icon on the main

screen, this icon will flash until access to the media server is established.

I've also update the thumbnails display. I decided to go with larger thumbs, but with only 15 displayed at a time. After some more consideration I turned the transparency back on, originally I shut it off to speed up the animation, but I found that the performance was not greatly effected if I slowed the animation down.

heres the new screen shot below...

The buttons have been updated with a transparency effect and I've changed the color scheme to greens and blues. I removed the top title bar and removed the genres list. In order to change genres you just click on the Genres icon or use the up down buttons of the controller. The menu item itself now disappears when you move the cursor out of the top left of the screen. I went for a more is less kind of idea.

When you click on the movie thumbnail a new screen appears on top, its displayed below...

This display lists the movie description and the two play buttons give you the option of trying to play it directly from your movie directory or having it stream through the PS3 media server. I'm still going to update the play buttons, they don't fit within the program.

One last refinement I made was finishing the control of the program, I was able to program in some limited controller function, below is the breakdown...

The last piece of the puzzle though is the ability to edit the movies xml from within flash, lets say you want to update the genre or the description, or even add a new movie without having to regenerate the entire movie directory, it sure would be nice to do that from the ps3. Once that's completed, I'll post the finished software with installation instructions. In the mean time I may post a video on youtube of what I have so far in action, just to gauge the response.

Hi all, just created a quick flash movie of the media system in action, here's the download link... playerinaction

its a flash video, I didnt want to make it too huge...
enjoy.
ok now im on youtube check it out

something interesting

Hi folks, when I started the project, my main purpose was to get a better interface happening for the ps3, the interface is now built and I'm currently touching up elements with the graphics. After doing some more testing I discovered that there were some files in my collection that would not play on the playstation3, I was getting the famous o file not supported. So I began to think, perhaps I do need the use of a media streamer/transcoder... After further study and testing I am now pleased to announce that the interface I'm currently building now supports the ps3 media streamer. So where am I at? well, these are the things I plan to wrap up...

1. full flash adding/updating of media files (right now everything is running through a assortment of java and asp scripts that dynamically build the xml catalogs)

2. finalize the user interface(graphics wise)

3. The genres drop lists needs to be automatically generated from the xml, right now its hardcoded into the Flash files(you'd be stuck with the genres I code in)

4. Thumbnails... I'm debating this one, and i think the final version will still depend on you folks getting those from the internet yourselves.

5. finally I would like to run everything from a portable server and get away from using iis for winxp. Ideally this whole package should run from a thumb drive that you can move from computer to computer.

so far so good

Hi all,
if you been reading the blog so far I've figured out the steaming part to some extent, and I'm working out the presentation part. I went back to the drawing board and did some surfing on the ps3 just to see what type of content it can handle. I'm running the latest firmware and thankfully sony decided to include flash 9 support. From there I began to focus my search on flash websites. The bulk of the content was slow and laggy but I did catch a break on some pages. As long as content was presented without too much animation or scrolling, the ps3 was able to keep up. I then began looking for free flash templates and came across flashmo.com there was a nice template there that did kind of what I wanted. This is the one I grabbed..



Yippie, now its time to learn flash, luckily I have access to such things and began to get to work... After getting a handle of the basic structure/layout and programing structure I was able to break down the components and how they function. In a nut shell, the template was pulling content from a XML document mapping where the photos are stored and contained for each image (root). There was a seperate folder for the actual displayed images. If you go check out the free flash site and look at the template you will know what I'm talking about. After several days of work where am I at? heres the new screen capture....
The covers I searched around the internet for, if you look you will find them. Now what I have after revising the code (genre sorting/directory listing) and updating some images/effects from the template we now have something more respectable. I may still revise some of the interface, I like buttons that fly around. As a side note, I had to write a program to build the xml doc, I can do the leg work to get covers but I needed a way to populate the xml with my directory listing/genre/description its now working like a champ. Now I am almost finished, when I do get this done, since its built from a free template, you will get this free as well. oh and by the way this works great on the ps3 and since its web based it works on any pc/mac connected to your network.
stay tuned, a release is pretty close.
if you want to comment please do, accidentally had it disabled.

quick update....

So far what Ive done is setup iis on my home pc, its a hp p4 2.66 running winxp. Its got a pretty low grade everything in it, but ive only really used it for skype, some word processing and web browsing. Anyways, I've determined the only way into the ps3 besides media server, is through the web browser. After doing the configuring for iis on the pc I was able to do a directory listing of all my movies. Kind of like the picture below.
What I discovered was that my movies would buffer and play to the playstation when clicked on. I'm not an expert at streaming, in fact dont know much about it, so I'm only assuming that this was just a straight file transfer from the pc to ps3 where the playstation would play the file as it downloaded. I was able to watch several movies and I noticed no jitters or re-buffers like internet content. At this point I'm pretty excited, because this now means I can build a simple web page with hyperlinks to my content..Remember I want large thumbnails and descriptions. a simple directory listing wouldn't do. My first attempt was like the image below. You would roll over the links and a larger thumbnail would appear on the top right of the screen.
Its not pretty, but now I'm getting somewhere. After scrolling up and down this list I found it hard to read the titles, the cover art overload the page and I soon had the ps3 out of memory error, crappy browser. Undaunted, I looked at other options. As I still need this thing to display in style.

Advancement slow going but I'm optomistic

Good evening all,
After googling around to find if there was software or anything that could give me a thumbnail and proper display for my titles on the ps3, nothing turned up. My requirements are simple: display my movies in a thumbnail format larger than what is available on the current xmb and list a large legible proper title. I came across ps3 Media Server and gave it a shot. This was good stuff however it seemed to be streaming software and worked with the current media server component. Currently my videos are all in AVI or MP4 format, I don't have to re-encoding is not a issue. I then came across Tversity and tried the free version, it installed, and actually for a frontend and server component they put a lot of work into it, but once again it did not meet my needs. This software seemed to have an emphasis on feeds and youtube content. There was a option for the inclusion of your own local content but it still didn't fit the bill. Finally there was a solution of installing Linux onto the ps3. I didn't look too deep into it, as installing a full blown os wasn't on my list.

After all of this research I now know I cannot access the content on the usb drive from my ps3 without going through the playstation menu (generic film icon, improper title) so that means the content is going to have to move to a remote computer if I want thumbnails. That's fine; the computers wired to the router and the ps3 are the same. But does this mean I have to use the media server component? Nope...after looking at all these options, I now have a game plan.

I'm still thinking something similar to this for the PS3...

First post

Hi all,
If you're reading this several things may have brought you here, a google search on the Playstation 3 xmb for displaying video thumbnails or even streaming content. Why am I blogging this? Well in my situation I like the ps3 but want to use it for more then a game machine. The video playback of an avi/mp4 file on this machine is incredible, but we are all stuck with the lack of development for this purpose.

let me begin with a little background on what Ive come to find out.....

1. The Playstion 3 has no support for displaying video thumbnails from a usb drive.
2. It doesn't do video previews unless you copy the video to the hard drive.
3. The list that does get displayed is only listed as a generic video icon with
the file name underneath.
4. There is a media server component that does support thumbnails and proper name
listing but is still tied to the up down scrolling of the Playstation xmb

These are some of the issues I've come across, I find it a shame that such a powerful console is seriously lacking when it comes to displaying content, Sony if you ever read
this PLEASE UPDATE the display of video content to at least rival or match appletv/xbox360 or any other capable media player.


So dear reader, if I were a simple man I would leave well enough alone and enjoy the great graphics of call of duty and just be content with the clicking list of video files scrolling up and down. But I cannot.

few notes to add here before you get too far, if your looking to simply stream video to your ps3 there are free options available, google it as I did. what I wanted was a way to visually display and present my videos in a proper manner. If you want to watch youtube or other content from the internet on your ps3 then this blog is not for you...

This blog is about dealing with my local content and getting it to display and play on my ps3 in a visually pleasing and effective manner nothing more nothing less.

stay tunned there is more to come........