PS3 Media Server, an old Mac Mini and a bit of gimping

The PS3 is an absolute beast of a machine. It fully wazzes all over the XBOX 360 and the Wii. Not only does it play games, it plays Blu Ray video, outputs 1080P HD video, 7.1. HD sound, gets you online wirelessly, and, amongst other things, will play happily with DLNA servers, which, in short, is a protocol for streaming a variety of media, such as video, over a network.

To get streaming working, you need some sort of DLNA server, i.e., an interface between the actual video file and the PS3 – i.e., something which tells the PS3 what is available, the PS3 then does the rest. PS3 Media Server (PMS) is the best solution out there, apart from its unfortunate acronym. It’s free and multi-platform, which means that if you’ve got an old computer lying around (Linux, Mac or dare I say it, Windows) then you’ll be getting the most out of your PS3 before you know it. In my case I have an unused G4 PowerPC Mac Mini running 10.4.*. Installing the software is a cinch and then configuring it is a piece of piss. PMS literally spews out logging info, so you can usually find the problem if it won’t work. (Main thing is making sure UPnP is enabled.)

Anyway, after getting it running, I wanted PMS to run without needing the Mac Mini to be logged in all the time… security issues and so on. So, if you want to get PS3 Media Server running in “headless” mode.. i.e., in the background, without needing the Mac to be logged in… here’s how you do it. It’s very simple, but you need another computer with an SSH client. I have a Macbook Pro laptop which has SSH built in to the terminal, but Putty is a good SSH client for Windows machines. If you’re Linux, I’m guessing this whole post wil be of very little interest to you Using SSH is beyond the scope of this, but it’s not that scary, really!

It’s best if you set PMS up (all the shares, options etc.) using the GUI, then save your settings and log out of the computer.

Then open an SSH session to the target machine… e.g.,

> ssh username@yourcomp.local

Enter your password when prompted (the first time you’ll get asked about saving an RSA key… just say yes)

then run

> sudo open “/Applications/PS3 Media Server.app”

give it a chance and eventually it should return to the prompt. You can see if it’s running by doing a

> top

and you should see a “JavaApplication” somewhere near the top of the list. Press q to exit. Note that prefixing the command with sudo tells it to run as root – you need to do this otherwise when you log out of SSH then the session dies!

If the PMS doesn’t show up in your PS3, you can check the debug.log file by going to

> nano “/Applications/PS3 Media Server App/Contents/Java/debug.log”

and then scrolling through the notes to see what happened and fixing any issues. Press CTRL + X to exit nano.

If (as in my case) your media is on an external drive attached to the target machine (I have a Lacie drive attached via Firewire*) then you’ll need to mount the drive so that you can play off it. First thing is to find your drive:

> diskutil list

It will most likely be /dev/disk1 but check in the list just in case (i.e., if you have more than one drive attached)

Then to mount it

> diskutil mountdisk /dev/disk1

Then you’ll need to restart PMS. I don’t know of a more elegant way of quitting it than killing it. So do a

> top

and in the list find JavaApplication. If there is more than one in the list, then you can figure out which one corresponds to PMS by making it do something… e.g., when you play a video on your PS3, its activity should change a lot. Anyway, once you’ve found it, take a note of the process ID (in the leftmost column), then issue

> kill [processid], i.e., if the process ID was 51234 you’d do

> kill 51234

You may need to run kill as root, in which case prefix the command with “sudo”, i.e.,

> sudo kill 51234

And that’s about it. I’ve now got all kinds of stuff streaming wirelessly from my server stuff downstairs to my PS3 upstairs in my lounge. Shhweet.

Hope that was helpful to some people.

* On this subject – if you’re looking to set something smiilar up, then a Firewire drive is usually preferable to USB. In the days of USB2.0 it’s perhaps less of an issue, but Firewire is the better choice as a guaranteed transfer rate i.e., it delivers its content at a set rate, whereas USB is a variable bitrate, I think…