PS3 Media Server Continued...

My initial reaction to the PS3 Media Server has been right on so far. I tried streaming a variety of HD-encoded movies to my PS3 over wired and wireless connections. Only videos with the lowest HD bitrates will stream seamlessly over 802.11g, which makes perfect sense. G-woreless does not have the bandwitdth for that amount of data. 802.11n might work, but I don't have any N-based equipment to test on. The wired connection, however, streamed like a dream. This is a 100Base-T connection, not gigabit. I was able to stream every movie I had without hiccups, including an uncompressed Blu-ray rip, complete with 5.1 surround, which I'm pretty sure was the Dolby lossless primary audio track. All in all, very impressive. I should add that proper decoding/demuxing for streaming requires a newer PC to do the heavy lifting. I have a Core 2 Duo (3 GHz)-based system that decodes/demuxes an uncompressed Blu-ray using 75% CPU. Hardware a bit lesser than this should work fine, but not to much lower. If your living room is lacking an HD streamer, but not a PS3, and you have PC with newer hardware, then PS3 Media Server is where it's at.