So you have a large library of media on your MAC and no Apple TV to stream it to.  But you do have a Xbox 360 and or Playstation 3 that can stream media perfectly well.  How, then, can you use your MAC to send out the media in a high quality stream and have it seen by your game consoles.  Well my friends, the solution has arrived.  Playback by Yazsoft is the software that makes the above possible and it does it with ease.  The software is available for a low cost of $15 from their website.  

Playback is written with ease of use in mind for every level user.  It simply makes all of your media available to all UPnP based devices on your network, whether they be game consoles and or other types of media sharing devices.  The software is about 14.8mb to download and true to fashion looks like a great OS X based application with the UI fairing to be as simple as one could hope for.

Usage:

The status screen is the main screen of the software.  Here you enable what media types you would like to share and give your 'SERVER' a name.  You can either select the current computer name and or assign one of your liking via the dropdown.  You will notice that Media Sharing can be turned on or off by hitting the start/stop button to the right.  Once started you need not worry as the application runs in the background and shares your media.

The second section is Movies and is for enabling what movie types you would like to share.  It is pretty self explanatory.

The third section is for Music, again self explanatory.

Pictures is number 4 and is quite impressive.  It will share images from iPhoto, Aperture, Adobe Lightroom, and Photo Booth.  I found it impressive only because it detected that I had Aperture and Lightroom and made both of their libraries available for sharing/streaming.

The final three tabs are Sharing, Access, and General.  Sharing basically lets you choose if you would like Playback to generate Thumbnails for your media, the time that it should read your libraries, and allows you to limit the bandwidth used for media streaming.

The Access section allows you to grant access permissions to all devices or specific devices.  If you select specific devices then a list of all UPnP devices on your network is presented to you so you can add them one by one.

The General section has some further options which are self explanatory...screen shots are below.

Once running and sharing, the streaming computer name (TC-MACPRO) appeard in both our Xbox 360 and PS3 game consoles.  I was then able to see all of my playlists and images and select them to stream with ease.  Your experience will depend on what device you are using for playback, but the purpose here is to get the media to that device and Playback does a stellar job. 

The connectivity in our home to our consoles is ethernet via cat 5e cabling simply because if you want the best experience, wireless will not cut it...not yet at least.  I use Apple Airport Dual Band base stations and even with Wireless N there is some lag when streaming media.  Copper is best.  All of my media via Playback streamed without problem except for some lag in Video.  I have 2-3 movies that I have purchased via iTunes and they are pretty high quality.  When I streamed the video I noticed some lag and start up delays.  Not a deal breaker but something that should be mentioned.

Conclusion:

Yazsoft has a great product and it will only get better with time.  I would like to give Playback a 5/5 but I feel it needs work on the video side of things.  Therefore a 4.5/5.  The product is excellent and delivers exactly what it should. 

Please let me know if you have any specific questions.  I can be found on Twitter as @tchachra or via my blog 2S2D.NET

Playback - $15.00 USD

Yazsoft