Streaming content to all my TV's?

In my case I have a ReadyNAS which has a UPnP server inbuilt and so can stream media (in the same protocol that these TVs will take next year). The inbuilt RAID is also a life saver as I know when one of my disks failed.

In turn I have three PS3s with wired connections to the network - Home Theatre, Living Room and Lounge and they work flawlessly. PS3 is a little bit finiky in terms of the content they play but once you get it sorted it performs really well in terms of mpeg2 (ts files, m2ts files), music files (mp3) and photos (jpeg). The HD performance is especially pleasing as they are perfoming flawlessly at bit rates well in excess of 20mbps peaking at over 30 (I had read that some people had issues when playing with peaks at above 20) - identical picture quality to the blu-ray disk

My main regrets are that the PS3 does not play FLAC natively (so I use the squeezebox instead) and it cannot play streamed DTS tracks - limited to AC3 / Dolby Digital. Other negatives are can't have chapter breaks in streamed content or selectable sub-titles - you need to burn them in the file - neither of these are deal killers for me but they might be for others

I also have an eva8000 in a bedroom which I use (rather than run an output from a PS3 in another room) because the tv in the bedroom cannot decode 5.1 sound and as a result output from the PS3 does not work - no centre channel sound whereas with the Netgear I can tell it to downmix to 2 channel for that TV. Netgear handles std dev ok but gives up the ghost completely on the HD files. The netgear was the first purchase before the PS3 firmware allowed streaming, once PS3 was capaable of streaming the netgear never got used and hence relegated to the bedroom

One bonus of the PS3 (if viewing output in another room) is that the bluetooth remote means you can control the PS3 through walls etc without needing remote extenders etc, and of course not fogetting the bonus Blu-Ray player and games machine.

Pipe dream would be XBMC interface on a PS3 - I loved it on the xbox but too noisy and lack of hd performance has consigned to the dustbin - and not sure that I can be bothered with a PC with the XBMC linux / windows releases.

I would conclude finally that I have found the PS3 solution very family friendly, it just works - couldn't say the same about the netgear although it undoubtedly is more flexible - play ISOs etc with full dvd menus etcs

Karnage

JaBZ

jpollock

DMC