Once you create three folders on the highest root menu of your hard drive (the set of folders it accesses whenever you just click on the drive) that are called PHOTO, MUSIC, and VIDEO, then you just cut and paste whatever you want into those folders. Don't bury things more than one or two folders deep once they are in there though, otherwise it wond't fin them (annoying feature they need to change, IMO).
Most files will play off your hard drive if they will play on your PS3. Some, like Xvid in particular, have to be copied to the PS3 itself before they will play. Otherwise, it will just say "Unsupported Data". You can check the codec type in the lower left corner of the file when it appears on the screen.
It is a pain to set this up initially, but once you figure it out, it is one of the best features of the PS3. I HATE, HATE, HATE, watching stuff on my computer, so I was ecstatic once I got a good deal of media up and running on the PS3.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
