I was talking to a guy the other day that told me you can download movies onto an external hard drive for a ps3 and play them through it onto your tv. Does anyone here know how exactly i would go about this and what kind of hard drive is compatable with the ps3 and also what kind of files it would play. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
All PS3s come with at least a 40G hard drive, so you don't need an external hard drive to start. You can store music, pictures and movies on this and replay them on your TV. The PS3 recognises 95% of movie files (.avi, .mp4 etc) but there are a few which for some reason won't play. A free program called PS3Video9 will convert movie files to a usable format. Files can be transferred via memory stick or wirelessly from your pc/laptop. You can buy your own larger hard drive (such as this one http://tinyurl.com/4dcfpq) and with a little bit of tech knowledge (or a Youtube search), it's easy to swap it for the one currently in the PS3. Check out the PS3 media forum at http://community.eu.playstation.com/playstationeu/board?board.id=417. It really is a case of trial and error with all of this. It can be very frustrating when you are setting everything up but the effort is worth it.
The reason is that the movie file is only a container, which holds the video and audio codecs. In other words, you may have 2 files ending ".avi", however that doesn't mean they are identical; they may contain differing codecs. I don't know about the PS3, but for example with the Popcorn Hour NMT box (which I have - allows you to play movie files etc) there are regular firmware releases for new codecs. So for example, the mkv format (compressed high def) might not work on the PS3? Anyway, 40 GB can easily be filled with movies (DVDRips average 700-900 MBs, so that would be 40-50 movies or so - high def movies can be anything up to 10GB ). I believe the PS3 takes a standard external hard drive - and now is a good time to buy as memory prices seem to be getting so low (I picked up a basic 1TB External hard drive from komplett a few months ago for just over €100). Remember to format the drive as FAT32 (NTFS won't work apparently). See http://www.wikihow.com/Add-an-External-Hard-Drive-to-a-PlayStation-3.
Basically you would need to have a wireless broadband to stream the films. WMP 11 would be needed or you could download tiversity and set up your films within the libary of that basically your ps3 will then recognise the software and away you go!!!!
Yeah I download movies through my laptop onto a regular 1TB external drive and whenever I want to watch one I copy it to a usb pen/memory stick and play it through my ps3.