Hi! I new here and new to the PS3. I was wondering a few things how can i watch movies i have downloaded from the internet i want to store them on a external hard drive(i was thinking of getting Fantom GreenDrive 1TB USB 2.0 and also a Kingston 8GB DataTraveler USB 2.0 Flash Drive). Is this some of the things i will need to do it. What is the max gb i should use on the external hard drive and flash drive with the PS3. Also how do i watch them on the PS3. Can anyone help me with this. Thanks for all the help.
I don't believe we've run into a maximum limit external HDD can be yet with the PS3. However the external HDD has to be in the fat32 format which does have a file size limit which is 4gb iirc.
The PS3 should be able to play mostavi files you throw at it which is the most common video container atm. If it doesn't play, or is an MKV etc. there are various different converters out there to change it to a more ps3 friendly format.
Personally I prefer to just use a media server which does all the conversions for me and I don't have to monkey around with copying files and getting under the 4gb limit. But it of course limits the portability.
you can do it right from windows plug in the drive, right click it in "My Computer", press format... choose fat32. 4gb filesize limit though.
Not a problem, however. most avis are far less than this, and if you want to watch HDblu-ray rips for example in 1080p, these are mkv, but can be QUICKLY converted to ps3 format using mkv2vob, which conveniently also splits the file into 4gb parts.
never heard of dvd-fab but if MKV is what you want to watch on your PS3 i would recommend MKV2VOB.
It's a one-click FREE application, most of the time it doesn't even re-encode the video, just remuxes it into a PS3 format. Takes 5 minutes tops for a full length movie and 0 quality loss.
If re-encoding IS needed (i.e. subtitles) it does a great job of that too, and you can be sure all files are ps3 compatible! I would highly recommend it.