MediaLink for Mac

Share your Mac's digital multimedia content with your PS3

For me, the feature which best sums up the PlayStation's impressive multimedia capabilities is its membership of the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance). This means that the PS3 can communicate and share content with a large number of other networked devices. And although Apple aren't members of the DLNA, several companies have been working to enable streaming of multimedia content from Macs to the PS3. Nullriver's MediaLink is the newest kid on the block.

MediaLink works in a similar way to its competitors, acting as a file server which allows you to stream multimedia files, including your iTunes and iPhoto libraries across your home network. Your PS3 detects the server, connects and the shared content shows up in the XMB (PS3 menu).

When compared with its competitors, notably Elgato's EyeConnect, MediaLink performs very well. I experienced no cuts in transmission or delays, and I was impressed to see better handling of iTunes artwork as well as video previews. Some DivX files which worked with other media servers weren't detected by MediaLink, which was disappointing. I think this was due to the files having the '.divx' format and I expect that this issue will fixed in time. That said, video playback generally works without issues, though image quality was not always as good as when using EyeConnect.

Browsing photo and music libraries is a breeze with MediaLink, though there are some interesting differences with competitors in the way that it presents the iTunes library. I noticed that EyeConnect always displays the iTunes library exactly as iTunes would (select an artist, then an album and you'll see tracks by that artist which feature on that album), while MediaLink seems to use a different indexing system (select an artist and then an album and you'll see all the tracks on that album, irrespective of artist) - this suggests that MediaLink is building its own index of files rather than relying on your iTunes library file.

MediaLink is a robust, reliable media server option for sharing content from your Mac to your PS3, and compares well to other apps in its class. Recommended.

Corrects Mac OS X 10.5.8 incompatibilityAdds Turkish, Portuguese, Chinese subtitle supportMediaLink now reads track numbers from ID3 tags for the Folders SourceAdded a new compatiblity mode option in Settings that disables QuickTime duration scans and ID3 tag readingFixes QuickTime hangs on MPEG files causing DLNA 2006Fixes potential crash during listing of files

Changes

• Corrects Mac OS X 10.5.8 incompatibilityAdds Turkish, Portuguese, Chinese subtitle supportMediaLink now reads track numbers from ID3 tags for the Folders SourceAdded a new compatiblity mode option in Settings that disables QuickTime duration scans and ID3 tag readingFixes QuickTime hangs on MPEG files causing DLNA 2006Fixes potential crash during listing of files