Media Streamers

[horton]

I've gone all digital and all my films and music are stored on an external HD. It's fine for the computer but how do I go about connecting it up to the TV/PS3? I've had a look at PCWorld etc. and they all seem to come with dedicated memory to store your stuff on. Is there an "adaptor" type thing that will enable any external harddrive to be connected to the tv/ps3 so ya can play your things there without using the computer or are such devices stupidly expensive?

Danke!

[A N Mouse]

Recent tv's will have a usb port on them. The actual quality/functionality of the browser varies greatly though.

Western digital and the like do devices, that you can connect any hard drive to and control with a remote. Your talking around 100 quid mark.

For a bit more it's probably worth looking at latest hdd freeview boxes (see icecrypt and similar), most of these will stream from external drive/internet.

If you're prepared to put a little work in then it's worth considering putting together your own, cheap, htpc box and using something like xbmc.

I'm open to correction here, but also believe the ps3 can browse external drives hooked up via usb.

A few of the above will depend on the formatting (file system - ntfs/fat32) of your external drive - with fat/32 being slightly more universally accessible.

[dahamsta]

I use PS3 Media Server (http://www.ps3mediaserver.org/) on the server under my stairs; used to be one of those cheap Dell office servers running stock Fedora 13, but I'm in the middle of replacing it with an N40L (http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/ie/en/sm/WF06b/15351-15351-4237916-4237917-4237917-4248009-5163346.html) running Amahi (http://www.amahi.org/) off a flash drive.

N40L cost just €150 after the November rebate, and I should be able to populate it with 4x500GB of disks for <€200. When TB disks come down in price again I should be able to squeeze 6x1TB into it if I use the CD/DVD bay too. I think 6TB'll keep me going a while. :)

I was lucky enough to buy a house with cat7, but it should work over wifi just fine. Course there's a lot more to Amahi than streaming to your TV, but at least you'll have somewhere central to store all your porn!

[theworm2345]

I've gone all digital and all my films and music are stored on an external HD. It's fine for the computer but how do I go about connecting it up to the TV/PS3? I've had a look at PCWorld etc. and they all seem to come with dedicated memory to store your stuff on. Is there an "adaptor" type thing that will enable any external harddrive to be connected to the tv/ps3 so ya can play your things there without using the computer or are such devices stupidly expensive?

Danke!
Easiest (and perhaps cheapest) option might just be to hook the external hard drive up to the computer, buy an HDMI cable, then open the files in VLC and hit full screen.

[tetsujin1979]

Some modern TV have a PC connection, that's the setup I have in my bedroom, a Packard Bell iMedia desktop plugged into a 26 inch LG flatscreen
Also, I live and die for XBMC - http://xbmc.org/ - absolutely amazing piece of software to control and run all your media, wherever it's stored