Well, I was up all hours last night messing around with the media sharing capabilities of Windows Media Player. Eventually I got frustrated with trying to make WMP work correctly, and during a marathon search session, I found a much better way to stream video. It’s a freeware program called PS3 Media Server — you can get it here, by clicking this link.
It will play pretty much any file, including .MKVs. It will transcode those files on the fly; I watched a movie last night and there was zero lag during any point of my viewing. I have heard people complain that it doesn’t react fast enough to pause and fast-forward, but I didn’t experience that myself — it seemed to work perfectly fine for me.
One quick hint — if your media will not play, navigate to the “TRANSCODE” folder that shows up on your PS3, then select the file, then select a transcoding method. It’s slightly confusing at first but very easy to get the hang of pretty quickly.
So, if you’re tired of mucking around with Windows Media Player to stream your files to your PS3, you should definitely click the link above and install PS3 Media Server. It’s free; it’s incredibly easy to set up, incredibly easy to use, incredibly easy to configure — and, more important, it WORKS!