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I am totally new to Raspberry Pi, and media servers - I do have experience with Debian command line though. Is it possible to make a Raspberry Pi have a local folder that can be shared as some sort of "media server" so my PS3 can access videos from inside of it? They are both on my wired local network.
Currently I am running Wheezy because of the Debian architecture, but I am open to switching the OS if there is something else that would be more suitable for this task.
I would say yes. I've done this with a different ARM box and Debian Wheezy. I've been using rygel as the server software. Installation and starting should be simple:
$ sudo apt-get install rygel
$ rygel
^C to kill and quit
There is a config UI of a sort (rygel-gtk IIRC) or you can edit the config file (~/.config/rygel/config IIRC). You can set a number of shared directories and more or less obscure plugins and other features. I've found it to be the simplest thing that works with a PS3 reliably.
It should be possible to get thumbnailing and transcoding working, but I think I haven't looked into that on ARM. Thumbs work on my laptop.
There are other projects around if you want to look, including Mediatomb (should be in Debian) and ps3ms (Java). Others may or may not work with PS3 in particular. Old versions of Rygel also had problems here.
You need to setup a DLNA media server on the Pi. If you are running Wheezy or a Debian system, just do a little research on how to set that up. This link might be helpful to get you started: http://gigatech.co.uk/blog/?p=356
Details on PS3: http://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps3/current/settings/connectdlna.html
