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There are several projects, like spu-medialib and mesa3d, which accelerate PS3 graphics/video on the Cell's SPEs. spu-medialib is actually a general framework for acceleration, while mesa3d offloads OpenGL onto the SPEs as a GPU.

There's a narrative tutorial for installing the spu-medialib mplayer driver, with links to files, that plays video on the SPEs quite well, including 1080p HD videos.

The USB works fine, so an external HD should work fine. I don't know whether there are PPC (the Cell's application core) drivers for a USB tuner card, but you should try it. If it doesn't work, make it work with some programming. That's what Linux is all about :).

I wish that he would have mentioned some way to run MAME, that's better than SNES games anyway.

Also, here is a way to run a fast Mplayer on PS3 Linux. This custom version of Mplayer uses the SPUs. I have an 80 GB PS3 and I'm eager to try some of this stuff out.

There is already X/MPlayer video acceleration on the Cell's HW.

Yes, the X/MPlayer video driver works now, playing 1080p HD video right out of the builtin HDMI port.

You might find yourself leaving your PC on just to play a game once in a while.

The X/MPlayer video driver plays 1080p video through the HDMI port, accelerated on the Cell's SPUs.

The limited RAM is still a problem. But not for playing video, which streams from either disk or the Gb-e LAN. And there are other hacks, including some HW hacks, if you need more RAM for more serious computing that isn't based on the stream model.

There is an X/MPlayer video driver that runs 2D on the Cell's SPUs, while the Cell's PPC core runs Linux and regular Linux apps. It needs some more work, and 3D functions are yet to be added to the Cell SW. But although the PS3 GPU is indeed a 1.8TFLOPS nVidia chip, I'd say that the 204GFLOPS Cell is "where all the power is" now, and several times as fast as your PC.

BTW, the PS3 runs PS1 games under the Sony GameOS in SW emulation at full (or greater) speed, without using Linux.

The Cell's SPUs are used as video accelerators by the X/MPlayer video driver, while Linux and other apps run on the Cell's 3.2GHz PPC core without slowing for the video.

The WiFi, Bluetooth and all the other snappy onboard HW is also now running under Ubunuto.

You are judging the platform on its initial Linux support from 2 years ago, when the machine was released (rushed to market). Since then, the platform has come of age. It still needs testing and packaging help to be "grandma ready", but that's why geeks like Slashdotters should get into it now: Linux is a community effort, and the community should try it now that it's at critical mass.

And, as a Cell dev kit, it's a $500 platform that can develop Linux apps that can run on $million supercomputers. And it plays games.

There is an X/MPlayer video driver that plays 1080p HD video on the Cell's SPUs quite nicely, while the Cell's PPC core runs the Linux kernel without distraction.

To use PPC apps, you don't have to "compile them yourself". This is Ubuntu. All you do is apt-get install them from a source package.

What's "news" is that this isn't the release version of Linux on PS3 that you installed back then, and that now it actually works.

There is indeed now a X/MPlayer video driver that runs full 1080p HD right on the Cell CPU.

And I don't know why you think the Cell CPU "really isn't designed for general purpose computing". That Cell includes a 3.2GHz multithreaded PowerPC that runs all PPC distro Linux SW right out of the distro, as apt-get'able binaries. And there are drivers and apps that use the Cell's 200GFLOPS of onboard DSPs for real computing, like that driver to which I just linked. The Cell is being used by IBM as the CPU in its highest end workstations and blade servers, as well as some of the fastest supercomputers on the drawing board - all running Linux compatible with the one on the Cell.

Look, I understand that 2 years ago the PS3's initial Linux support was more of a novelty, when the PS3 itself had been rushed to market before even the HW was really ready. But the past 2 years has seen its Linux support pass the stage where it's just a "dancing poodle" to where it's more like a husky sleighdog or a border collie. And the reason is that interested people have helped upgrade its Linux support. Linux is open-source so that users can improve it. Which people have done. It still needs a lot of help, but mainly because its potential is so huge, with the onboard supercomputer and built-in WiFi/Bluetooth/Blu-Ray/HDMI/7.1-audio/Gb-ethernet, all for $500. And that chance for volunteers to continue to shape the platform is exciting news for a lot of people, many of whom are exactly the kinds of geeks who read Slashdot.

And I hear it plays games, too.

There is an entire community dedicated to running Ubuntu on a PS3, at PSUbuntu.com. And you don't have to upgrade your HD from whatever size your PS3 came with, although of course it's easy and you can do it. The PS3 HW works right out of the box.

Right now is a good time to join the PSUbuntu.com community, because a new wave of developers on the ubuntu-cell maillist have just joined, and are uniting with the users at PSUbuntu.com to test and smooth out the PS3/Ubuntu distro.

And there is also a fairly new X/MPlayer driver that will render full 1080p HD video on the PS3's Cell CPU, that also needs just a little testing and integration.

What I really want to see is a PS3 running Ubuntu using the PlayTV PVR device that Sony is releasing this year. With Ubuntu running it, the PS3 could be quite the killer platform for all home entertainment.

And I hear it plays games, too.