I have recently brought a HDTV, DVD player and Surround Sound system and would like to be able to play various types of media. I have been considering buying a Media PC based upon the shuttle xpc barebones system but have recently wondered if the PS3 would be able to give me something of what I want.

I will mainly be playing DVDs that I have ripped to a NAS and clips that I have downloaded from the internet. My questions regarding the PS3 are as follows,

- Is it possible to playback DVDs that I have ripped to a NAS device. I use DVD Encrypt. The NAS will be seen as a remote folder on the network. I do not wish to use the 60gb internal hard drive as this is far too small to store my collection.

- Is it possible to playback types of media i.e. MP3 and MPEG4 from a remote folder.

Any experiences / advice would be much appreciated.

Here is a list of supported media...

So you may be able to playback DVD's stored on an exteral drive but MPEG4 files will need to be re-encoded using something like PS3 Video9 to make them compatible.