Then you have the other media formats. XBOX 360 was only ever meant to be an ‘Multimedia Extender'. In other words, it was expected that by this time, most people would have a PC dedicated to hosting multimedia using either Windows Media Center or Vista Home. The 360 would pull the files off this dedicated media PC over the network. Therefore, the 360's multimedia capabilities are actually quite poor. It supports MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and MPEG-4 AVC (h.264), but only in the WMV, MOV, and TS container formats. It supports DLNA, so is able to discover files on DLNA software like Windows Vista.
Playstation 3 was intended to be an all-in-one media center, and the design shows. At first, it did not support DLNA, but we broke the story when DLNA-supporting firmware was released, allowing multimedia to be streamed from Vista to the Playstation 3. All the major codecs are supported by Playstation 3; MPEG-1, MPEG-2, Motion JPEG (commonly found with digital cameras) through AVI, MOV, MP4, and TS container formats. It will even play AVCHD files directly (M2TS files - the same format Blu-Ray uses).
MP4 support is seen as the future of video, and the PS3 has very good support of this. It supports MPEG-4 AAC audio, MPEG-4 Simple Profile video, as well as Main and High profile (also known as h.264). In a big story last week, it was announced that the PS3 would soon be supporting the DivX codec, through the AVI file container. This will be the first time a non-modified console supports this highly popular format. Here's hoping for MKV h.264 support!
Audio playback is close, with the PS3 having the minor advantage of supporting SACD, although this is no longer supported with the 40GB version. It's been sad to see Sony drop many of the advantages they held over the 360 in the past year. Playstation 3 will always be better as a standalone music player since it doesn't sound like a jet engine, but the 360 has the great advantage of being able to access music from within any game.
I have viewed photos on both consoles, and find the PS3 to be a more pleasant experience. Again, the XMB is so much better than XBOX 360's tabbed Dashboard, and it's nice to view pictures without noisy fans blasting away in the background. The PS3 supports some printers directly, which may or may not be useful (I can't imagine using it as a photo printer, but someone might. probably someone in Japan).
Other considerations:
Import Gaming
The PS3 excels in this, as all games are currently unlocked and can be played on systems from any region. This makes importing games from other countries a breeze. Furthermore, you are free to create PSN accounts for any country, allowing you to download demos from other regions. You won't be able to make purchases without a credit card from those countries however. XBOX 360 has many games that are exclusive to Japan and Europe, but with region encoding, they are only playable on consoles from their respective regions. Going the other way, many titles that get a worldwide release don't have region encoding at all, so owning a 360 outside of the US isn't so bad if you still want to play US games. Take it from me: import gaming goes both ways!Piracy
A touchy subject, but one that must be considered. Although PS3 ISO's are being released, I'm pretty sure that its game copy protection has yet to be cracked. XBOX 360 on the other hand, has a large scene going for it, and that has to be a consideration for many people deciding on which console to buy. Be warned though; Microsoft actively fights piracy, and has been known to ban consoles from connecting to XBOX Live if a mod is detected!Folding@Home
This may not be a big deal to you, but perhaps it should be mentioned. If you are interested in joining a worldwide supercomputer cluster capable of 700 teraflops, and want to help find the cure for diseases like cancer, the PS3 may be worthy of consideration. For most though, this function doesn't make a difference at all.PSP Connectivity
With the 1.8 firmware release, the Playstation 3 received some excellent features, not the least of which is the ability to stream media to the PSP - anywhere in the world. Once two devices are partnered, you can turn on the PS3 from your PSP (as of firmware 2.0) and access all the files on it with the PSP - including HD video. This is where Microsoft got things wrong by trying to turn the 360 into a media extender. Sony decided to make the Playstation 3 a media hub, extending to portable devices like the PSP. A very wise decision, and the features get even better with time.Reliability
Here's a huge one that must be considered - XBOX 360's made prior to October 2007 are pretty much considered time bombs. It's not a matter of whether your console will stop working, it's a matter of when.The 360 has such a high failure rate that Microsoft spent over $1 billion to extend everyone's warranty by 3 years. While having a long warranty is nice, knowing that it's only a matter of time before the console dies, nobody wants to have a dead console in the first place. Newer units seem to be okay, so far (knock on wood).Backwards Compatibility
This was one of the major advantages of the Playstation 3 when it first launched last year. Since it had all the necessary hardware from the Playstation 2, it would be fully compatible with all PS2 games. Additionally, PS2 games would eventually be upsampled, improving their image quality for newer HD displays. PS2 owners could safely pass along their old console, knowing that their game library would still be accessible, and look better than ever. However, as Sony started revising hardware to cut costs, backwards compatibility suffered. First to go was the "Emotion Engine" CPU in the 80GB version. Some games were still supported through software emulation, since the "Graphics Synthesizer" GPU remained intact; reports show 80GB backwards compatibility to be around 50%. With the latest version of the PS3 (40 GB), the GPU was also removed, and as of now there is no way to emulate PS2 games on these systems. Although it's probably not impossible to emulate the GPU with the PS3's hardware, nothing has been announced and I wouldn't get my hopes up of this ever happening.XBOX 360's backwards compatibility is nothing to brag about either; consider it at about the level of the 80GB PS3. Many XBOX 1 games will work, but often have problems.Display Connectivity
The Playstation 3 wasn't the only one to get some hardware revisions in the past year. One of the largest criticisms of the XBOX 360 was the fact that it had no digital video output. However, all consoles released after September 2007 (including the low-end Arcade version) include an HDMI 1.2 digital port. Only the Elite comes with a cable in-box.
