running ps3 media server on linux

the hard disk on the ps3 has quite a limited capacity…especially after a few games have been installed that require a few giga­bytes of storage. so instead of using the local disk i like to stream media from my laptop runing linux (cur­rently ubuntu 9.10).

one solu­tion is to use ps3 media server. grab the com­pressed files here and extract them to a dir­ect­ory of your choice.

firstly you may need to change the per­mis­sions on PMS.sh so that your non root user may execute it ‘sudo chmod 777 PMS.sh’. then run ./PMS.sh as a regular user to fire up the server.  if your ps3 doesn’t appear like the screen­shot here then go to the ‘General Con­fig­ur­a­tion’ tab and enter the IP address of your linux box (NOT THE PS3) and restart the server…hopefully the ps3 should now be detec­ted cor­rectly. next step is to add your media shares. i edited PMS.conf manu­ally with gedit (you could try brows­ing for your dir­ect­or­ies dir­ectly from the server inter­face but that didn’t work for me). after ‘folders =’ add the path to the media you want to share…for example if you want to add your music folder add this ‘\/home\/user\/Music,’. repeat this for all the folders you’d like to share with the ps3, save the file and then restart the server.

if you now go to the music section of the ps3 and scroll down the ps3 media server icon should appear and you can drill down the dir­ect­or­ies to find the music you want. i’ve shared music (mp3 & flac), video (various formats) and images. all have played back flaw­lessly. a great little solu­tion to the problem of stream­ing to your ps3 from linux. i’m sure there are many other methods but this worked well for me.