Category: PS3
Nyko Blue Wave Remote
One of the more curious omissions from the PS3 is an infrared receiver. The controllers work via Bluetooth, as does the more conventional remote control for media playback that Sony sells separately. Unfortunately, most universal remotes (including mine) use IR or RF, so I resigned myself to picking up the Sony remote so that Jordan and I could control DVD/Blu-ray playback without using the Sixaxis. Thankfully I checked a few online forums, and someone mentioned the Nyko Blue Wave remote, which operates via IR.
I received the remote in the mail a few days ago, spent ten minutes teaching my universal remote the buttons, and just like that my one-remote household is preserved…with one small exception. Because the Nyko IR receiver plugs into one of the PS3 USB slots, and those slots don’t have power when the PS3 is off, I still have to turn on the machine with one of the Sixaxis controllers before I can use my universal remote. Not a big deal, but a small annoyance that makes me question what Sony was thinking – if they’re touting the PS3 as a high-end piece of consumer electronics, why ignore the fact that most universal remotes use IR?
Streaming from Mac to PS3
(Photo by _Idris_)Took a stab at setting up media streaming from the Mac to the PS3 and found it to be relatively straightforward. There’s a few options for doing this, the first being Elgato’s EyeConnect and the other being Twonky Vision. EyeConnect appeared to be a little more polished and installs as a System Preference Pane, so I tried that one first. Unfortunately, while I could browse my media just fine, playing the media usually didn’t work. Occasionally I would get a song to play or mp3 to load, but most of the time I ended up with a generic network error message. I’ve noted a few online forum messages that imply that the latest firmware update (v2.0) to the PS3 seems to have broken things for EyeConnect, so hopefully this is just classic blip in the relatively new space of media streaming and they’ll have that patched up quickly.
In the meantime, I’ve installed the Twonky Vision media server, which runs quite well. Management is done via a web panel, and so far playback has been pretty solid aside from the occasional hiccup. Resetting the media server’s client table usually solves those issues. The drawback is that for some reason AAC files (even unprotected ones) don’t play – they’re listed as “Unsupported Data” in menu listings. Thankfully most of my music is in regular old mp3 files, but it’s still a bit disappointing given that the PS3 actually can play AAC files just fine. EyeConnect supports unprotected AAC, but of course getting it to actually play the files without constant network errors was impossible.So this solution works ok for now, and I’m going to ride out the 30-day demo on the Twonky Vision software while keeping an eye out for EyeConnect updates before plunking down for one of them. It’s nice to be able to route my media to the home system without using an iPod dock (or an AppleTV).