Okay all, I’ve been refraining from posting this for some time now but I figure since Sony just signed a deal with NetFlix that it’s about time to come forth.
All too often I see my friends PS3’s not being used to their full potential. Like installing Ubuntu with the Six Axis support to be able to play online poker games that don’t suck as bad as the PS3 store ones! Most of my friends aren’t this geeky, but we’ll talk about this later because you don’t need to be a geek to follow this one.
So you have a PS3 and you probably realize that it’s much more than a gaming system, it’s actually a pretty beefy computer system with wifi and ethernet and beautiful HD visuals. Unfortunately I’ve yet to find one decent and legal site that offers streaming media to the PS3 owner. This is due to very poor browser design and flash support on behalf of Sony. After months of owning a PS3 I’ve collected a handful of awesome ways to both download and stream movies and TV shows which I am sharing with you. The following is for informational purpose only and I do not condone the piracy of any copy protected content (see disclaimer).
Downloading Movies:
My favorite resource to download movies to my PS3 is StageVu. I’ve setup some decent search filters to help me find high quality DVD rips in short time. To try this start by going here:
http://stagevu.com/videos (if on your PS3, hold the X button down to open new window then L2 to come back here for more instructions…)
Now that your back your going to want to click on Advanced Search on the top navigation bar. Set the Minimum Length to whatever you feel is appropriate, for example if your looking for a full lenth movie I’d give a minimum of at least 45 minutes.
Next I usually set the Rating FROM 5 stars TO 5 stars and click search. This gives me a wide selection of highly rated content to select from.
(Another way to search if your looking for HIGH quality is to specify a minimum resolution of 640 x 480.)
Now with this in mind hit R2 and go back to the the StageVu site and do as I say! (then hit L2 to come back!)
You should have seen a fairly sexy list of movies to choose from, again, I DO NOT CONDONE THE PIRACY OF COPY PROTECTED CONTENT. From this point proceed at your own risk.
Once you have selected the movie of choice click on it and when prompted to run the plugin click Yes. You should see a flash video window draw on the screen with the Play Icon. Hover over the icon then hit Triangle button to pop up your menu screen. Now click File then Save Target As. This should feed the .avi file into your Download Manager. Select Download in Background and go find some more movies!
Typical full lenth movies average around 700 MB and can vary due to length and encoding quality. I’ve had over 80 full lengths downloaded at one point in time all with cute icons. (picture to come). The quality typically is as good as Digital TV if not slightly better. (one notch below DVD quality).
Streaming Movies and TV shows:
There are actually quite a few decent sites to stream content for on the PS3… too bad Sony’s new PS3 YouTube interface TOTALLY SUX0RS! I mean it’s cool… looking… but wtf Sony, UPGRADE YOUR BROWSER PLEASEEE!
For this tutorial i’m going to talk about TVShack.net
TV Shack has a large number of links to outside sources that host TV Shows and Movies but I will warn you… Sony’s browser sucks when it’s fed a large amount of data and will often cause a Denial of Service like state on your PS3 where it will totally freeze up. (or if your lucky you can hold your PS3 button down to power cycle).
So you’ve been warned… if you notice your PS3 becomes unresponsive during this walkthru dont panic, just try to Add a Bookmark to the page before it freezes (then reboot your PS3 if needed… This problem occurs most often on the Movies page because it loads such a big list of movies poor PS3 can’t handle it).
Now head over to http://tvshack.net/ and click on Video Channels -> Television. A list will load of TV Shows that you can watch on your PS3 or PC. Some of the links are bad but dont get frustrated, tons of them are still live. Many of the episodes have alternate links on the top right of the page, i find that Megavideo links are the best quality and fastest to load. Unfortunately you only get about 60 minutes on megavideo before they give you an hour long timeout unless you pay for their service.
Once you’ve played around with this for a bit you may notice that many links are also hosted on Tudou and Youku. Both these sites are overseas so often time the content is less restricted, unforunately in the USA you will most often get poor bandwith from these two sites. If you dont mind waiting a half hour or more for the video to buffer then just queue it up and pause it till enough of a buffer is built for you to stream without interruption.
If for some reason Youku or Tudou load fast for you, you may like to use google to locate a movie or tv show of choice. Here are some examples on how to do that:
1. goto Google.com
2. search for:
site:youku.com Entourage
or
site:tudou.com Entourage
Google will provide you a list of pages on the site with the results “Entourage”. Even though the sites are in another language, the look and feel should be familar enough for you to find what your looking for. If you need further clairification on this feel free to post!