I’ve had the PS3 for about two years now, but more than games, I’ve been watching movies on it. The PS3 supports DivX/MPEG-4 as well as Windows Media playback, so if you’ve got it hooked up to a nice big TV, there’s no reason to continue watching movies on your Mac.

However, in most scenarios, your Mac is the central repository for all your downloaded media. Movies, music and photos that you may download are either stored on your Mac HD or an external hard drive. Getting these to play directly on your TV would usually involve connecting the external hard drive to the TV/DVD player or the PS3 and playing them them off the drive.

But that’s so 2005. The PS3 has Wi-Fi. Your Mac has Wi-Fi. Why do you still have wires going into your media player?

uPnP

Enter uPnP. Universal Plug and Play (uPnP for short) is a set of protocols that allow devices to interact with each other over a network without requiring any configuration or software drivers. A subset of this standard—and the one we’re more interested in—is called uPnP AV or DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance), which allows for devices called media servers to stream content over the network to uPnP clients.

The PS3 is a uPnP client that can pull media from a server and play it back on your TV wirelessly. If you’re using Windows Vista or higher, you can enable Media Sharing in Windows Media Player 11, which will make your PC act as a DLNA media server. If you’re running Mac OS X, there’s no similar, built-in functionality. And if you’re using Mac OS 9, you really need to go and get a new Mac.

Playback

To fill that void in Mac OS X, there’s YazSoft’s Playback. It’s a very, very simple application that takes a list of folders with music, movies and photos and makes your Mac behave as a DLNA media server. One of the few things I missed from my switch to Mac from Windows was the ability to wirelessly play movies from my computer on my PS3 and Playback is exactly what I was looking for.

When I said ‘simple’, I really meant it. I can’t stress how easy Playback is to set up and use. You start the app. You pick the folders with your media. You click the “Start” button. And then you go sit on the couch with the PS3 controller. In fact, it can take longer to set up Media Sharing in Windows Media Player 11 and if it suddenly stops working (for e.g.. if your PS3 can’t find the media server or any content in it), it’s quite a pain to try and figure out what’s going wrong and where. Playback gets full points on ease of use.

In spite of being so simple, Playback doesn’t compromise on functionality. You can share movies, music pictures, or just one of these items (via tick boxes on the main screen). You can add multiple folder locations from all attached storage devices or you can just share your iTunes and iPhoto content.

Note that even though movies in your iTunes library can be streamed by Playback, DRM-protected content such as store purchases are not streamable. This is understandable on part of the app, but might be a hindrance for those who depend on the iTunes Store for their content (AppleTV would be a much better solution for those).

For the more advanced and/or security-conscious users, you can also limit your media server bandwidth and control which devices can access the content on your media server. Typically, you won’t need this in a home environment, but if you’ve got a PS3 in the office, well, you’re lucky in more ways than one.

What it looks like on the PS3

The cherry on top is Growl notification support. Everytime a new client connects to your server and/or starts playing movies or music, Playback growls at you.

Performance

You can watch most movies hiccup-free, so long as they’re not several gigabytes in size. Single or double CD movies work fine, but movies over that can stutter a bit. The Macs support 802.11n, but the PS3 doesn’t and that’s the problem.

Sometimes, even with basic ~700MB movies, you may encounter a few pauses and stutters, but this isn’t Playback’s problem. I noticed this behavior with Windows too. This typically is heightened if you’re streaming media from an external hard drive. I have a 1TB USB hard drive which contains most of my movies and music, so I occasionally run into this problem, but I’ve learnt to ignore it. A few breaks in a movie are good anyway!

Price and Conclusion

Playback costs just $15. I think it’s excellent value for money from a product that does what it does, is so easy to use and so flexible. If you’ve got a uPnP AV/DLNA compliant device such as the PS3 or Xbox360¹ and a stash of movies and music on your Mac (or an external hard drive), there’s no reason to not buy this.

If you’re not convinced, download the trial copy of Playback and give it a shot. I’m sure you’ll like it.

Reviewed version: 1.1
Pros: Easy to set up and use, flexible, cheap
Cons: Unable to play DRM-protected content
Rating: 4/5

Alternatives

Before I tried Playback, I tried using Plex (formerly XBMC) and Boxee. Both were very unreliable and seemed to crash randomly. In my configuration, I was unable to get any movie to stream to the PS3 using either of these. It was a scratch I couldn’t itch. It didn’t take me more than 5 minutes to start watching the movie after installing Playback. It was so relieving.

However, Boxee and Plex are free and are full-fledged media center applications with a lot more functionality, so the comparison is not entirely fair.

Aalaap Ghag cannot be described in a few lines across the bottom of this review. In fact, this PHP coding, Twitter addicted, Samosa Pav eating guy has got more than fifteen lines of description across his homepage.