This is Jim from Adirondack Mac with an update on Gaming Consoles and the Mac.

Over the past few years game consoles have aspired to become part of your home network and entertainment system. In addition to their role as gaming devices, they offer media playback and streaming. Out of the box, they function as so-called media extenders via Windows Media Center, and with the PS3 and Xbox360, this is really easily accomplished. The Mac has been a more recent admission to the party, but no less pleasurable a guest, though, as you’ll see, one that has to pay the price of admission to get the most functionality.

The advancement of the computer communications between consoles is largely the advent of UPnP specifications, referring to an architecture which offers:

• Media and device independence. UPnP technology can run on any network technology including Wi-Fi, coax, phone line, power line, Ethernet and Firewire.
• Platform independence. Vendors can use any operating system and any programming language to build UPnP products.

I think that the most successful of the programs below have utilized UPnP under the hood in the least conspicuous way.

Let me tell you a bit about what seems to work, in order of increasing success. I’ve included some information on XBox360 and PS3, and to a lesser extent the Wii

For the true propeller-heads, there are several command-line (or near command-line) utilities out there. Mediatomb (mediatomb.cc) is free, open source, and lets the user

• browse and playback media via UPnP
• sophisticated web UI with a tree view of the database and the file system, allowing to add/remove/edit/browse your media
• highly flexible media format transcoding via plugins / scripts
• highly flexible configuration, allowing you to control the behavior of various features of the server
• support for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X

In reality, operating the program requires what appears to be a degree in command line gymnastics. Though there numerous guides on the net, reading the comments was enough to dissuade me from attempting this approach. My geek cred shall fall farther before all this is done. Currently Mediatomb only works for the PS3.

Twonky Mediaserver (twonkyvision.de) is a $30 US program for Mac and Linux. It lives as a webapplication with no mac gui. It can transcode to some degree, but again, reading the guest comments on web sites, there were a great many difficulties with getting it to work well with the 360 or PS3, and for the money, there are much better choices, as we’ll see. Twonky can run from a NAS device to serve to your console, and there are several guides to using it with a Drobo, if this seems appealing to you.

The next best approach in my opinion is to use virtualization. Clearly you could respawn your Mac in bootcamp to be a winbox, but how wrong is that? Virtualization with programs like Parallels did work for me. In Parallels, I had equal success with Windows Media Player 10 and 11. You find your device in the “Media Sharing Panel” set access, and which media you would like to share. This worked pretty well for me with my devices, once I had my Mac’s media folders set as shared directories. But again, there was a bit of a clunk factor in it all. Inelegant to say the least. Other options include using Orb, which streams media via a web interface. Orb has promised a Mac client for almost as long as they’ve existed, without much to show for the bluster. If they ever do, this could really shake things up, since Orb is also available for the iPhone/Touch.

Over the past year or two, several servers dedicated to the job at hand have emerged. The freeware choice is PS3 Mediaserver at ps3mediaserver.blogspot.com. This is an open source Java-based server that really worked well for me. It required a little bit of setup and a tad of consternation, but once I adjusted a few things, it worked well with avi files and iTunes. It’s pretty configurable, and you can point it at almost any folder on your Mac that you want to share.

Better yet are a pair of $20 applications found at nullriver.com. Connect360 streams to the Xbox as you would imagine, and Medialink to the PS3. They do the same thing, do it well, and don’t actually conflict with each other if you happen to have both devices. I was able to stream most common formats such as avi, mp4, aac, mp3, etc without a hitch on either platform. Wired or wireless each seemed to work well without pixelation or stuttering of audio or video. I had no trouble with my network or router issues. Both programs install as preference panes, allow reasonable configuration flexibility, and update the software regularly. They require 10.4 or later.

A relative newcomer to the block is Cynical Peak software’s $18.95 program “Rivet.” Rivet is a menubar application rather than a prefpane. Rivet has the benefit of acting as a single server program for both PS3 and 360 rather than two separate programs. It works very well. It’s fast, provides good playback of supported file formats (AAC, MP3, WMA, H.264, DIVX, AVI, WMV, JPEG, GIF, RAW, TIFF, PSD, PDF, and more). It does a better job of preserving the iTunes folder construct, and allow various folders to serve as sources for movies, whereas the nullriver products allow only one folder at a time (no problem if all your movies live in one folder). Rivet requires Leopard.

The former 3 programs all have demos available.
I don’t have a Wii, so can’t comment directly. The most full featured program I found appears to be Riverfold Software’s $19 Wii Transfer which sets up a little web server on your Mac. Opera’s “Internet Channel” then can access this server to:

• Share movies, music, and pictures to your Wii over the local network.
• Copy Miis to your Mac and save them as JPEG images
• Works with most common movie formats, including MOV, AVI, MPEG4, H.264, DivX, and more.

However, as the Wii doesn’t have a dedicated media player, the program transcodes the video into Flash. The quality is apparently not very good. As I mentioned, I don’t have one, and I think as a media center it seems less evolved than the others.

The wonderful thing is that as the consoles evolve, the Mac has been included by able 3rd party programs. While generally not free, they are inexpensive.
Other Websites:
http://orb.com/

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