Oh, the only thing about the PS3 is that it won't play lossless WMAs, which is most of my music collection, unless a recent update has changed that. Nice to know about the OPPO.

That's where some of the fancier media server software comes in. They can transcode between formats on the fly when serving up the data. So WMA/FLAC can be served as WAV. MKV can be turned into M2TS.

On the NAS / WHS solution, i would recommend going the WHS route but agree with Chris on the build. HP box is a dumb solution. I built my own PC and installed the WHS OS on it. I got various add-ons running on it along with squeeze center and playon and torrent.

It does all my backup along with duplicating (something like Raid) and also allows me to access all my content on the web.

--Avi

BTW, i moved from the freeNAS solution to WHS and love it.
Got my WHS OS for about $40 from microsoft :-)

Having never used Windows Home Server, but the full version of 2008; what makes WHS so great for serving media files, over just a standard Windows 7? Microsoft doesn't make DLNA software which understands MKV or FLAC files do they? So you're still reliant on 3rd party software to do the serving. Windows 7 has H.264 and Dolby Digital Plus codecs installed by default, so just Haali Media Splitter is all that's needed for most MKV playback.