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November 11th, 2006, 08:11 Posted By: wraggster
In our first look at the PlayStation 3's media playback features, we initially the system to be limited by its directory structure design -- unless media was stored in the proper folder, it would not be read by the PS3. But surprise! With a tap of the Triangle button, the PS3 becomes a fully-formed directory searcher, and can indeed find and play music, photos, videos or playlists from anywhere on most any media device.
The PS3 itself is designed to browse only the folders it is designed to browse -- the root-level VIDEO, MUSIC, and PHOTO folders (as well as the standard MP_ROOT and DCIM folders shared across many media devices.) It will load media directly from the system and load them onto the PS3 menu in the proper media setting, so if you choose Photo on the PS3 menu, it will show the images in your PSP or Memory Stick or Compact Flash or SD card or USB keychain folder. More importantly, it will not show media not in those proper folders -- unlike on a PC, it does not have a "media search" function to find multimedia elsewhere on your external device.
But never fear, because there is also a "Display All" feature when selecting your Memory Stick or other USB-connected device that allows you to browse the entire directory structure, and thus load whatever's on the drive that the system recognizes. This indeed works for any media type. We were able to run music from an iPod and pull video from a random spot on our USB mini-drive. It's a hidden option that some may not notice at first, and sorting through folders isn't exactly easy (an iPod is full of all kinds of dummy files that are not music, for instance, and the folders are not named after the albums or songs stored in them -- if you can sort your media for proper playback on PS3, you're going to want to), but at least the option is there. Thank the Lloyd!
And how does connecting a media device work with PS3? We tried a number of devices. The first was an iRiver unit -- the iRiver H10 player. This unit is notorious for difficulty in driver functionality and mounting on PC and Mac systems -- the unit requires custom drivers instead of mounting as a standard USB device. As expected, the unit did not mount and was not able to offer music playback. This was one of the few cases we've had where the PS3 just could do nothing with the device, as usually, there's a way around the problem.
After that, we plugged in a standard 20GB full-size Video iPod. The PS3 recognized the iPod just fine, even displaying on the screen that the unit was in fact an iPod. However, the directory structure Apple chose for iPod is not something that PS3 recognizes (or at least does not recognize in the latest update, v1.10.) The iPod will mount, but no video, audio or photo tracks can be found on the standard XMB menu. Jump into "Display All", however, and it's a totally different story -- you can see the Calendar and music directories, and can browse as deep as you need to in order to find the files. As we mentioned, finding music on an iPod is difficult sometimes because iTunes makes a number of Apple-needed files (images and encryption notes and things like that) in the folder, and also avoids common folder names. However, it works fine in a pinch, and it may be possible that Sony could add iPod folder browsing to the PS3's abilities in a later update.
Finally, we plugged in a PSP (and also an offloaded PSP Memory Stick). As expected, the PSP is recognized as a PSP and is mounted as a USB device, and the music plays back from the PSP-mounted unit or any given Memory Stick just fine, so long as the folders are set properly. The PS3 recognizes both the PSP/MUSIC folder structure as well as the new MUSIC root folder added in PSP v2.80 (and now a common folder for Memory Stick formatting), and you can do anything in the PS3's music feature set with a PSP (including playback, file transfer to and from PS3's HDD, file naming, etc.) A quick note, however: the PS3 will not recognize nested folders (folders inside other folders) unless you use "Display All", which shouldn't be a problem for most Memory Stick users since the PSP has the same limit, but it is frustrating in some ways since neither device natively lets you put your music with albums inside artist folders, as many do on their home PCs.
The "Display All" thankfully fixes some issues we had with the PSP's version of the XMB menu seen on PS3, and hopefully Sony will add some more support functions to PS3 in the future.
Via IGN
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