Here’s a Playstation Portable streaming music from FLAC files on a Linux server.

What’s going on here? Well, this is the PSP’s Remote Play feature, which lets you view and control a PS3 remotely. As I mentioned before, the FLAC files get transcoded to PCM on the fly by Mediatomb, a free and open source DLNA server for Linux. The clever bit is that this works across the Internet as well as on a local network, allowing you to play your FLAC library from anywhere with a wi-fi connection.

There are a couple of snags. Although the sound is decent, I get occasional stutters which spoil the effect. It also strikes me as inefficient (which means not green), running both a Linux server and a PS3 at home just to play music on the move. So this isn’t all that practical; but I found it an interesting experiment.

I’m not sure why Sony hasn’t joined all the dots with the PSP. It has a great screen, good sound, and would make a delightful streaming media client if the software were better. As it is, the only supported way (that I know of) to stream media is via the RSS client, which is far from ideal, or with the Remote Play feature as above.