So my husband bought a PS3 last night, successfully bringing our “you bought this so I get to buy this” volly to a close. A racing game came with the PS3, but Geoff also bough Rock Band, which I must admit is a pretty fun game.

Of course, Being the dork that I am, it was more interesting to me how the PS3 fits into our existing wireless network and gagety life. I didn’t have a lot of time to play last night, but here’s what I’ve done so far:

Got the PS3 connected to the internet. Obvious first step.

Tried out the PS3’s web browser- don’t think I’ll be using this for much of anything. Like the Wii’s browser, it seems pretty limited.

I tried to get the native media player to play some of my video files from disk - it would only play a few things (notably mp4’s) but since the vast majority of our collection is xvid avi’s, that’s not useful.

After a bit of research, I realized I needed to set up a UPnP home media network (I didn’t know what it was till I found I needed one!) - and I needed a program that would transcode my files into something the PS3 could read on the fly. I tried two - SimpleCenter and TVersity. I didn’t realize that the SimpleCenter free version does not do transcoding, so I was left with TVersity. Luckily, TVersity worked pretty well, once I changed the transcoding settings to PS3 and downgraded the quality a bit to make up for our slowish wireless network speed. The downside is that h.264 video (high def MKV’s) do not work (this is true of the hacked Xbox as well). They just make TVersity quit. The upside is that we don’t really need the hacked Xbox for the living room anymore, though I will wait a bit to make sure the PS3 is as easy to use before I decide for sure.

I will probably try to install Yellow Dog Linux on the PS3 sometime soon, and I’d like to get video streaming to the PSP as well (the idea of watching my downloaded shows in bed on the PSP over wireless is too good to pass up.) I’m sure there are weeks of tinkering with the thing ahead. I love that the PS3 has “install another OS” as a menu option, so I’m less worried about bricking the system or voiding the warranty.

So, why did we decide to buy yesterday? Well, Geoff found out that Sam’s Club had the 60 GB version of the PS3 in stock. As you can see from this chart, the 60 gig version is the only one that has 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi, Flash card readers, SACD support, and PS2 compatibility via hardware and (not an emulator.) Geoff had been looking at the 60 GB versions on Ebay, and they all looked scammy (and not much cheaper than we ended up getting ours for) so I’m glad we got one from a store.