So I am looking to build a small server to stream media to my wife's PS3 and I am wondering as to the state of PS3 Media Server on Slackware. Searching around, the most recent thread I found was from Sept. 2009 on the PMS forums, with the last post stating that it works decently as long as mplayer and ffmpeg are installed. So has anyone used it recently with good results (and if so, a slackbuild script may be handy as I've been unable to find one).

And as a bonus, can anyone comment on the streaming effectiveness of XBMC? Thus far, running PMS has worked flawlessly (on Windows) and I have yet to discover a filetype which it cannot convert to a PS3 compatible format (not that I'm looking for one, but I used to run into problems where I couldn't watch stuff and since I've started using PMS that hasn't happened). Can XBMC also flawless convert just about any filetype under the sun on the fly to stream to the PS3?

Thanks.

Just to clarify, XBMC is a media player while PS3 Media Server is...well, a server. XBMC would run on the computer you want to play the video files on, not a computer you want to stream the files from. As there is no PS3 port of XBMC available (since Sony removed Linux support from the PS3), it's not an option here.

As for running a server, I've never used PS3 Media Server itself, but I have used other UPnP servers to stream files to the PS3 in the past. I found it works passably well, but not something I was interested in doing over the long term (ironically, because I already had a system setup with XBMC).

I have to second these remarks. XBMC is probably the best media player ever committed to c++ code but it not a server! I tried out streaming on PS3 when my XBOX1 finally died as a possible replacement for XBMC but found it so lacking that I quickly decided to just build a new PC XBMC (on a $200 nettop PC)

Hmm, didn't know XBMC doesn't stream, that makes the choice easy! I guess I'll test PMS on a normal computer first before building a dedicated server.

I saw some notes in the mediatomb config relating to using it to transcode to a format for PS3. I was using mediatomb to serve files to my Boxee box before I switched to using NFS. (since it is native) I have never tried the PS3 portion but it might be worth testing.

For what it's worth, Media Tomb was the server I used when streaming to my own PS3. It worked, but I found some videos had issues or simply didn't play. It certainly wasn't perfect.

I almost forgot that hard drive prices are a lot higher now than normal, I'll have to be putting of the building of a server. In the meantime, I guess I'll try out both these programs and see how it goes.