PlayStation 3 and EyeConnect

The 1.8 patch for the PS3 has enabled new uPnP AV capabilities, which theoretically should allow me to play content from the G5 server on the TV in my living room. This would be great, since I lost the minimal capabilities I had (i.e. Airtunes) when I hooked the PS3 up to the wire in the living room instead of my Airport Express.

The problem is, the formats that the PS3 can currently understand appear to be severely limited, so ideally you would want a uPnP server that supported transcoding. Apparently, Nero 7 Ultra supports this, but it is a PC only product. In the Mac world, I found two uPnP servers that sort of work with the PS3: Elgato’s EyeConnect and TwonkyVision’s TwonkyMedia.

Based on what I have read on the net, TwonkyMedia seems to currently be slightly ahead on features, and is a more solid host for the PS3. But it does not integrate as well with the Mac (the GUI is a webserver running on a random port), is more difficult to configure (than EyeConnect) and can be difficult to uninstall.

On the other hand EyeConnect installs as a System Preference Panel, is easy to uninstall and is built by the company that makes EyeTV, which I am currently running to record live TV. It also supports a plug-in architecture that has transcoders for “Audio to WAV/LPCM” and “Picture to JPEG/BMP”. I’m hoping this means that they will extend this set over time. [Note: TwonkyMedia probably has these too.]

As you can probably guess, I went with EyeConnect, since I know it will provide the best integration with EyeTV. The company also seems to get the Mac design ethic, and I appreciate that enough to want to support them… and to be honest, I really had trouble taking a company called “Twonky” seriously.

Unfortunately, the current version of EyeConnect (1.1) isn’t a great experience when talking to the PS3. The single most significant problem appears to be that it has trouble maintaining the network connection. Almost every time you access content you get some kind of error displayed on the TV screen — variations on “Connection lost” or “Access denied. Oddly, the PS3 seems to still be able to play the content. I also noticed that folders that contained a lot of data (e.g. the entire iTunes Library) were truncated.

Another problem is in the way iTunes music is served: It doesn’t appear to currently be able to give you anything except playlists and the entire library. For this to be useful, it desperately needs “by artist” and “by album” categorizations.

However, despite these limitations, I was able to successfully view some of my photos, music and movies on the PS3, so I know we’re on the right track. The limited formats supported by the PS3 meant that I could only play music in MP3 format and Movies in MPEG-2 format. Some of my old music was ripped as MP3s, but I didn’t have any MP-2 movies lying around. VisualHub solved that problem for me. On the recommendation of a forum comment I read, I used the “MPEG” tab with the TIVO profile, which worked well, displaying a 1.1Meg movie surprisingly clearly at 42″ resolution.

I wrote to Elgato about the problems I was having and received this reply:

Thank you for contacting Elgato Systems.

The new PlayStation 3 firmware does offer the opportunity for software like EyeConnect to send data to it.

However, EyeConnect is not yet optimized for the PS3. This would explain the problems a few users have seen.

So, we will test EyeConnect with the PS3, and adjust EyeConnect software as needed.

Hopefully we can have our tests done soon, but we have no specific data to share about when this additional functionality might be ready.

Now, I’m a bit suspicious of the “problems a few users have seen” comment, since I couldn’t find anyone on the net who claimed that they had no problems, but it looks like they are aware of the issues and hopefully things will improve.

The other thing we need is for the PS3 to get a more reasonable list of supported formats. Supporting only a handful is just about unforgivable, given the absolute wealth of available codecs they could be using. (Hint: It’s been years since I found something VLC couldn’t play.)

Anyway, somewhere between new versions of EyeConnect and new revisions of the PS3 firmware, I expect this is all going to work out and I may finally have found a good reason for buying a PS3. 😉