PS3: Not just for games

[richidoo]

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=16963

[Carlman]

Yup.. it's a powerful box, it's basically a server.  It can be booted into Windows or Linux and act like a regular PC.. There is a lot you can do with a PS3.. plus it plays Blu-ray's.. has wifi, optical digital out, hdmi, and has bluetooth remotes and keyboards.  It's highly flexible and capable.  If you were to build something like it on your own, you'd definitely be in the thousands.. not just a few hundred.

-C

[richidoo]

Supposedly Sony loses money on them, but they won the BluRay war with it which will pay off in the long run. At first I thought USAF would use them to teach their old pilots some new tricks with battle sim games.

[AcidJazz]

Sony recent deal with Netflix to stream movies over the net via the PS3 have me leaning towards buying one.
I resisted picking up an el cheapo bluray player over the Black Friday weekend simply because I would rather have the PS3 for that specific reason.
Decisions decisions....

[richidoo]

Sounds like a good idea. It has a lot of benefits for the price.

Does it download the whole movie to HD or stream live with a big buffer?

[richidoo]

I think I mentioned somewhere else that my wife won a PS3 recently. It is getting a lot of use, but we haven't tried watching any movies yet, but my kids are watching Star Wars movies on it almost everyday. Last week I got a HDMI>DVI adapter in trade from BISL, and yesterday I received a HDMI cable so now we're using PS3 digital video, and it looks great! Still using analog audio input with Dolby surround processing in the receiver until I can get a toslink cable.  

The  cool thing is I am using just about every damn connection on the back of my 10 year old Onkyo receiver. DVR, DVD recorder, XBox, PS3, 5.1 speakers, S-video switching. Xbox component and PS3 digital are direct to TV. It is a freakin jungle of wires back there and all positive ions draw in the dust. Now with the high def connection on the TV again I'm lookin forward to watching some movies. I long ago stole the DVD player with digital video output for the audio system.

Anyway, my point of posting is that I got a $3 HDMI cable 6' from Parts Express, it works good.