PS3 Media Servers

Here is a list of some software i have found to help with your Media needs.

What is transcoding?

The average consumer doesn’t care about what technology is used to encode their media. They just want it to play. The problem is that many devices only support certain types of encoding and much media circulating around is in other formats. The solution? Transcoding. Transcoding means to convert a potentially unsupported encoding into a supported one for the receiving device on the fly. Wikipedia has more details on transcoding.

Analysis

While basic functionality is indicated on this chart, there is no way of knowing how many types of music, photo or video formats are supported. It is also difficult to tell what formats can be transcoded. Most of the informational pages for these products don’t give enough details, so without setting up every single product and testing all formats against a variety of devices, it’s very difficult to know for sure what the level of support is.

Four products support every operating system: Cidero, Cyber Media Gate, and  Rhapsody . Both Cidero and Cyber Media Gate are Java-based ports of their original C++ open-source counterparts. They appear to run on any Java 1.5 platform.

Geexbox has no OS listed because despite being Linux-based, it runs its own distribution to work. To get similar DLNA server functionality in Linux, uShare can be compiled and installed, which is what Geexbox uses for its own server.

SimpleCenter has a free version without transcoding support.