I am a PS3 fanboy, OK, more of a xbox hater.
PS3 filesystem
When I want to back my PS3 up I cracked out a 160GB USB drive, and discovered that the PS3 only reads FAT32. So I tried reformatting using my vista machine and it said the drive was too big ( M$ put a 32GB limit on it ). I tried using linux fdisk with no joy, and after reading a bit about it ( and using google of course ), I discovered a nifty command line tool called fat32 formatter, it was simple and did the job
Here is the link for that tool : http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm ( I also have copy in the attachments )
PS3 video encoding from Linux
So I keep seeing people having problem with video encoding for PS3. It is pretty simple using standard stock ffmpeg. Here are samples to make high quality mpeg2 and mpeg4 videos that play from my mythtv video server. Note the mpeg4 will typically look and sound better while being about 15% smaller, but the mpeg2 tends to be more portable.
ffmpeg -y -i input.avi -acodec mp2 -ab 192kb -vcodec mpeg2video -b 6Mb -f mpeg output.mpg
ffmpeg -y -i input.avi -target dvd -acodec aac -vcodec mpeg4 -f mp4 output.mp4
For more info check my page on DVD ripping