It all started for me back in high school.  I had a huge movie and music collection (20GB of music, 300+ movies) stored on an external hard drive.  Anytime I wanted to watch one of my movies, or listen to music, I’d have to hook up the external hard drive to my computer, copy over the movie or music, and put it on a USB drive.  I’d then have to take said USB drive and plug it into my PS3 or XBOX 360 to be able to watch or listen to my media.

While in college, I had built myself a machine that used my TV as a monitor so that I could watch my movies that way.  That solution will not work now that I don’t want my computer sitting in my living room next to my TV.

I had researched many different DLNA media servers that I could use; many were free, few had a price tag.  My requirements were that it needed to stream to my Sony PlayStation 3 in my bed room, my Microsoft Xbox 360 in the family room, and my iPhone for where ever I wanted to be in my house – price didn’t matter.

I found a program called Mezzmo that offered these solutions.  Mezzmo automatically finds and organizes all your music, movies and photos on your computer and imports music, movies, photos and playlists from your iTunes, and anywhere else that you specify in the program.  Media format support includes all popular video file formats, music file formats and image file formats.  You can even connect and stream to multiple devices at the same time- which was a huge plus to me because I have more than one device in my house. Mezzmo transcodes music, movies and photos on-the-fly so they play perfectly on your DLNA-enabled device such as the PS3 or XBOX 360.  I personally chose the option within Mezzmo to pre-transcode all your files before you stream them, preventing any buffering or synchronization issues that can associated with transcoding files on-the-fly.

Not only does Mezzmo organize your media files, it has the ability to provide each of your devices with thumbnails of the movies and pictures.

Mezzmo is ready to run and start being your media center with just installing, adding and processing media, and starting the server.  Once the server is started and it has processed all your files, fire up your PS3 or XBOX360 and you will see your Server as a video source in the menu of your device.

Check out Mezzmo here – the cost is $29.95, but worth every single penny!