DNLA3 is an open standard file sharing protocol. It was designed to allow for the easy sharing of media files, such as mp3s, pictures and videos, over a local area network. There are several media players and mass storage devices that use DNLA to share files.

With firmware update 1.80 (released May 24, 2007), Sony enabled the Playstation 3 to access this protocol. You may have noticed the "Search for Media Servers" option in the Playstation menu system (it's hard to miss, it's under every media type). This now gives Playstation owners a way to play various types of media on the Playstation 3, all while keeping the files stored elsewhere. This is very handy if you want to share the files between several computers and other devices.

There are a couple limitations. The Playstation 3 seems to have a rather limited number of codecs available to it. While I was testing it, I was able to get mpeg2 movies to play, but no xvid or avi files. Overall however, quality and streaming capabilities were excellent.

So, here comes the real question? How the heck to you setup a DNLA service so you can share files to the Playstation 3?

There are several DNLA media server software options out there. I personally like "Twonky Vision" (http://www.twonkyvision.com/). Yes. Go ahead and laugh, the name is... odd. But they offer a very easy to configure DNLA server. The best part: they have versions for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Twonky Vision installs as a service, assessable via a web based interface, port 9000, so open up that port on the computer the software gets installed on. You will need to access that to setup the paths to your media files and a couple other options. I set it up on my Linux file server, and had it up and running in no time at all. It will go though all the media and index it, so large libraries may take it awhile to index.

More info about the DNLA protocol is available from http://www.dlna.org (warning: it's all hype)