I've been using the PlayOn Media Server in my home theater setup to get my Hulu-to-TV fix (shhhh, don't tell Hulu) since I don't have a spare Intel Mac to devote to running Boxee on in the living room. Today PlayOn sent us a note that their software has just been infused with a whole lot more awesomeness in the form of local media browsing, making PlayOn an even more valuable Swiss Army knife for handling media in your home (on top of Hulu, it also streams Netflix, Amazon VOD, YouTube, CNN, ESPN, CBS and Revision3). We took a look at the new functionality on both the PS3 and the Xbox 360 and wanted to share our largely positive impressions.

Firstly the obvious thing worth mentioning is if you're running Windows Media Center and have a 360, much of this functionality is already baked in (here's our guide to setting it up). However, lots of folks report trouble getting WMC and the Xbox 360 to play nice together -- myself included. I tend to find that I can get it working once but the next time I power up the 360 it's not recognized as the same device by the media extender, requiring setup all over again. There are other solutions for doing this on the PS3 as well but the setup is more complicated and finicky. Plus, if you already use PlayOn Server it's nice to be able to get everything in one self-contained interface.

The new media browsing features add the ability to display photos and stream music and video files from the machine you're running PlayOn from. We downloaded the new version 2.59.3431 of the software and tried it out first on the Xbox 360. You'll first need to tell PlayOn which folders you want to share and restart the server. After that everything is very straightforward: on the Photos panel of your console you'll now see PlayOn as an option. You can navigate down into your folder structure, see thumbnail previews of images that can be enlarged to full screen size by pressing the X button. Transport controls then appear allowing you to start a slideshow if you wish, with the typical options available including turning shuffle on and off, putting the show on repeat, and rotating images clockwise or counter-clockwise.

Music streaming is just as simple, with the only caveat being that as far as we know it's simply file-based so won't tap into existing playlists from iTunes, Windows Media Player, or whatever software you use to organize your music collection. As long as that software keeps your files organized in some logical fashion you'll be just fine here, with the ability to browse and play by track, album, artist or genre. Unfortunately you can't save playlists you build up because that function is reserved for files on the 360's hard drive, but you can still quickly build up an ad hoc playlist, edit it if necessary, and get some tunes rolling very quickly.

Again, video streaming is just as easy. When you select PlayOn as your source from the Video pane as usual, you'll now see a new option at the bottom for "Shared Media (beta)." This is file-based like the others so simply navigate through the tree until you find the video you want to play. Confirm play to play; that's it. If you back out in the middle of watching something you'll get an option to "resume" which is nice.

Hopping over to the PlayStation 3, we found things pretty much the same. Use the XMB to navigate to photos and view by thumbnail. Click into a full-screen image view to get slideshow options here as well.

Likewise with music, you can browse by track, album, artist and genre. The "add to playlist" option is greyed out here so you don't have quite the same easy and immediate playlisting ability as on the 360, but that's likely more a limitation of the PS3 than the software. What you can do here that you can't on the 360 is quickly copy a track to the PS3 hard drive; and from there you can build those files into permanent playlists. You can of course turn on shuffle or repeat options while playing tracks as well.

With video, like on the 360 after you select PlayOn as your source you'll see a new option at the bottom for "Shared Media (beta)." This is again file system based, so simply navigate to your desired video and get to watching. 

Despite clearly labelling this feature release as "beta," we had no issues with any of the functionality in our testing. Given that PlayOn is in a bit of a pricier range at $40, but if you've already purchased it you've just had the good fortune of seeing it become twice as useful; you can head to the upgrade page to get the latest version. If you're on the fence after the 14-day trial, this might tip the scale. If you haven't tried it yet and are shopping around for media center solutions, we'd definitely recommend giving it a spin. If you're running a Macintosh machine as your main media server instead of Windows, check out two products from NullRiver depending on your console of choice: Connect 360 for the 360 (cryptic...) and MediaLink for the PS3. We can't vouch for the former, but the latter works great for $20 and even features Aperture support if you use that software to organize your photo library instead of iPhoto.

Happy media center-ing!