I had been contemplating a PS3 for BluRay, gaming, and streaming my music to the HT room. (Squeezebox does upstairs wonderfully but a PS3 does so much more for not much more money.) Been feeding my spontaneous shopping habits by asking everyone questions, including you guys.

Ran into an old friend last night who's brother had an 80GB model for sale as he was leaving for a military tour in South Africa. He wasn't sure he really wanted to sell it. He originally wanted 350 which I was only too eager to pay but all of a sudden he came up with an idea. He would only charge me $200 if I agreed to sell it back to him for the same price, should he decide he wants it upon his return in 6 to an unknown number of months.

DEAL!!
Worst case, I get a 6 months trial then get 100% of my money back!

I was amazed how simple this was to set up. It automatically determined that 1080i was the best my TV would do. It had connected to my home network before I even found my way into the network settings screen. The latest patch downloaded and installed seamlessly and I was done. I was almost disappointed that I didn't have to figure anything out for myself.

I turned on Media Sharing in my PC's Windows Media Player and by the time I walked back into the TV room, my music library was showing up on the PS3.

I normally like to bash Sony but I will give credit where it is due. What a well designed machine from an integration point of view. I expected an evening of tweaking and looking up troubleshooting hints on the internet. Nope. It just worked. Plain and simple.

The user interface for accessing the shared media is a disappointingly cludgy but it does the job. I'm going to experiment with TVersity to see if it can improve things. It's also free.

Anyone else have any experience in streamlining the streaming process?

Really, really nice deal!

I'm still personally waiting for the SqueezeBox Duet because I don't think I will be able to resist that remote control! But I too will add my voice about what additional music servers are supported by PS3? iTunes? Firefly? Proprietary one?

I freaking love my PS3. I've only had it for a week, but NOTHING beats playing games on a 50" HD TV (except maybe playing on a 50"+ tv).

I had problems connectin to my wireless network at first, but them I realized I needed to add the MAC address to my router, then bingo. I love how game updates are automatically found. This thing is the sh!t.

I just need to figure out how to stream my library from my mac.

Good job!

You can't lose on a deal like that.

To your question about the user interface, I actually went back to the PS3 interface after trying TVersity. I found TVersity horribly slow and, you guessed it, just as kludgy.

I think it would work well with a small music or video library, but once you're into hundreds of artists and thousands of songs, it just seems to bog down. If you find a better solution, I know I'm all ears as well!

you can navigate through a huge list of artists really fast with the xbox 360. Unfortunately xbox 360 does not support FLAC files...

Doing some research at lunch. So far it looks like once again, a Squeezebox just can't be beat.

If I ever invest in the Duet to get the remote control with built in browser <<Sweet!>>, I guess I could retire my old one to the HT room and then use the PS3 browser to run the Squeezecenter on the big screen instead of scrolling text on the unit itself.

I understand this works reasonably well if you use the "classic" skin and I'm sure someone is developing a PS3 skin as we speak. That's the beauty of open source devices.
Note if you plan on trying this: The 'standard' skin will freeze up your PS3 and force you to reboot.

Jason,
If your single music library is too big, have you considered breaking it into pieces by using a big external USB hard drive or adding a USB hub and use several external drives (I'm using 2). Also, either of the above solutions as well as upgrading the size of the PS3 internal HD and/or streaming from your PC.

The thing brings a big set of flexibilities/choices.

vassillios, I too would love a better way to integrate my Mac with my PS3. I use nullriver's connect360 with my xbox 360 which works wonderfully with videos and music. They have a similar program for the PS3 which seems to work quite well. I demoed it for the 30 minutes they allow you and found it to be generally fine, but since moving into our new apartment, I located my Airport Extreme up near the tv so when I want I can connect my external hard drive directly into my PS3, since I don't keep much media on my macbook hard drive these days. That was a really long response to a question you maybe don't even care about anymore. but for what it's worth, either directly connecting an external drive works great, and I am sure that mediashare will do great for you if you decide to go that route. let me know how you like it.

http://www.nullriver.com/products/medialink

SB3 lover here. Honestly the Duet has not caught me. Nicer remote, but who wants another remote? I hate more than 1 remote for any 1 system (Pronto 7000 for the main system). I prefer seeing "Playing Now" on the box itself.

FYI - 2 SB3s, and multi internet connections with SoftSqueeze. The whole family loves having access to all of the CDs.

Only about 520 gigs of FLACs so far. The server has 2TB in RAID 0+1.