Ps2 - The forgotten media centre!

witnessmenow

When you talk about consoles with media playing capabilities, the only one that is ever mentioned is the original xboxs, and in fairness xbmc is about as good of a media player as your likely to see. It looks great, is easy to use and is very well supported. Its also pretty easy to mod, especially with the save game exploit

But the xbox is not without its flaws:

Inserting a bigger hard drives isnt that simple of a process

Ide hard drives are getting rarer, especially large sizes

Sata hard drives with adapters are hit and miss (especially with 1.6 xboxs!!)

Although its extremely easy to use xbmc its self, putting files on it is not.

Moving stuff to it is s-l-o-w! 10mbs a second is it?


Now the PS2

Ps2s were by far the most popular consoles of that generation, the world and his wife had one! And there is probably a rather large amount of them now sitting idle in homes all throughout Ireland. But what isnt commonly known is that it is actually a pretty decent media player. It was never as easy to mod a ps2 as an xbox, up to quite recently (last few years). FreemcBoot is a softmod for the Ps2 that is contained entirely on the Ps2s memory card.

SMS is the media player that can be installed with freemcboot.

Now SMS as no where near as nice looking as XBMC:


Sms menu


XBMC

nor does it have the same amount of features.

Basically XBMC is better than SMS in every way, except for one. SMS supports fat32 formatted USB hard drives (personally i've seen drives as big as 1TB being used). So you can just throw the file you want to watch on a memoy stick or Usb HD and plug it straight in and it works. Its such a major plus point that it throws its self right back into contention with xbox as a media player.

When you consider that so many people already have a PS2 already you dont need to buy anything. Even if you have a Ps2 with a gammy laser why dont you reduce - reuse and recycle it into a media player!


To install Free mcboot you need to have access to a PS2 that can run hombrew (that is chipped, has a swap disc or even has freemcboot already).

If anybody needs the files for it send me an email through my site in my sig.

Any questions feel free to ask

animaX

I recently installed freemcboot on my ps2 (which has a gammy laser) and am now using an IDE harddrive with the network adaptor. It is such a great piece of kit. Problem is, i tried to play an avi file with SMS and it wouldn't work? Haven't bothered to use it since

witnessmenow

One particular avi file or all?

Cause it plays avi files grand for me, the only one it couldnt play was a 420p file (wasnt really suprised)

Keane you ol mucker, I first got all the stuff to do your Ps2, 18 months later and still no sign of the memory card! Send it up man!

animaX

witnessmenow wrote: »

One particular avi file or all?

It was one particular file. I guess I could have tried others but I usually just hook my laptop up to tv so I dont really need a media centre

weeder

have a slim ps2 here with no laser(it burnt when installing a modchip) would this work on it? and is there any sort of hdloader that would load games over a network like there was for gamecube
?

animaX

weeder wrote: »

have a slim ps2 here with no laser(it burnt when installing a modchip) would this work on it? and is there any sort of hdloader that would load games over a network like there was for gamecube
?

I think freemcboot does work on newer slimline consoles but obviously the network adapter with harddrive combo will not work. There is a HD loader which would work over usb (1.0) but it would have slowish loading times. I think you might be able to do something over network, check this out

witnessmenow

def works on a slim, I have it running on my sisters one.

Slims also have usb2.0, I dont know if hdloader supports the faster speeds though ?

weeder

so, someone wanna make me a memory card?

witnessmenow

I can do it for you if you'd like, but to be honest im so busy at the moment I would def need to charge the €10 I normally charge.

Alternatively If you have the means of running homebrew on a PS2 some how i can upload the files somewhere?

animaX

I just found the latest version of sms media player and I love it! I must have been using an older version earlier when I had trouble with it. I can no longer hook up my laptop to my tv to watch videos since it's giving me electric shocks but now I can use my ps2!

Is it just avi files that it supports?