This post is more-or-less what my last post started out as… before I got side-tracked explaining why I have a PS3 in the first place.
Shortly after getting the PS3 I started looking for a way to stream videos to it. I learnt that the PS3 requires a UPnP compatible media server and found this helpful blog post explaining how to setup MediaTomb.
The MediaTomb download page has packages for various flavours of Linux, but none specifically for Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (which I run at home). Fortunely the Ubuntu Feisty Fawn package works fine.
After installing that package and following the instructions linked above I still had to make a few changes to the MediaTomb config file:
~/.mediatomb/config
to ensure that the PS3 could see my computer and play DivX files (a new feature of the recent PS3 v2.10 firmware update).
In the server section I had to add a few things including an explicit IP address (which will be different depending on your machine configuration):
<ip>192.168.0.3</ip>
<protocolInfo extend=”yes”/>
And a new mapping to the mappings section:
<map from=”avi” to=”video/x-divx”/>
I’m not sure why it needs an explicit mapping from file extension to MIME type; it seems like assuming that all AVI files contain DivX movies is a bad idea because it’s not always true. However, streaming wasn’t working otherwise. I didn’t look into it too deeply.