A couple of weeks ago (just before the Blu-ray/HD DVD format war was proclaimed to be over), I bought a PS3.
Actually, no, we need to go back a bit further.
Just after Christmas, I splurged on a flatscreen TV. It's not enormous, but it's sufficiently nice that suddenly it showed up all the flaws in my TV signal (of which more in some other rant), and I started to feel the need to buy a DVD player, or something - something that would do this staggeringly expensive bit of kit justice. I looked into building a Home Theater PC (HTPC) - a computer which would run as PVR, DVD player, and home media server - and would have built one, too, but for the fact that someone suggested I look at a Playstation 3 instead. And in my research, it really looked like it ticked all the boxes. The boxes look like this:
Box 1: Play DVDs.
Box 2: Play DivX and Xvid movies which I have, ahem, acquired.
Box 3: Be
DLNA compliant so I could use it as a server for my
Pinnacle Soundbridge, which is my only way of getting music to my 1974 Tandberg amp. (note to hi-fi buffs - it's an early transistor one, not one of the legendary valve ones)
Box 4: Act as a PVR.
Box 5: Also, it would be nice to be able to get media off it in some way so I could watch movies on my laptop in bed.
I should say at this point, for God's sake please do not tell me what I should have bought. I work in a very geeky office. I have already had that conversation about a zillion times. I have what I have, okay? Move on.
That caveat aside, a PC can obviously do all this stuff and more besides... but it's a hassle to build one, and I struggled to find a box thin enough to fit under my TV (and the ones I did seemed to have their own foibles when it came to putting stuff inside them).
So much for the shopping list - does the PS3 tick all the boxes? Well, no. It hews closely to that venerable motto of the Sony Corporation : "Great hardware, shame about the software".
First off, I did not buy the PS3 to play games on it, so right now I do not own any games. This review is not about the gaming, which I'm sure is wonderful. I bought it as a media centre, and in this respect the PS3 has a number of stupid little flaws which really hobble it. First off, and most importantly in terms of my aforementioned boxes, it is DNLA compliant - but as a
client, not a server. So it won't talk to my Soundbridge. So the laptop is still doing duty as the repository of all my meedja, which was kind of what I wanted to avoid. For the same reason, the laptop cannot see whatever media is stored on the PS3's hard drive. So strike Box 5.
There's another box which we can't tick
quite yet - the PS3 will Real Soon Now have an extra box which can be attached to it which will turn it into a PVR... but the
PlayTV box is still slated to be released 'early 2008'.
So, in terms of network capability it has to be regarded as a bit of a flop. As far as I can tell, the logic behind this lack of functionality lies in a couple of hardware foibles which makes the PS3 unattractive to those with large home networks - in particular, the small amount of RAM in the box (256MB) means that, as a multitasking media server, streaming video to several places at once in someone's mansion somewhere, the PS3 ain't gonna cut it.
Of course, since it's just little ol' me here and I can't watch movies in bed and play games in the lounge at the same time, it'd probably be just fine, but let it pass.
Okay, so it won't serve stuff up to other machines, but it'll play everything, right? Right?
No. Nearly, oh so nearly, but... no. Again, Sony' software engineers have excelled themselves. The PS3 will play DivX stuff
unless it is DivX 3.1.1... and even then it is weirdly fussy about aspect ratios. For example, I have all 6 star wars movies that appear to be encoded identically, except for their sizes. 2 out of 6 won't play. In general I estimate that around a third of my entire movie collection will need to be re-encoded.
[EDIT: Firmware 2.20, which was released this week (26/3/08) does seem to have helped, a bit - but I still have a big swathe of movies that won't play.]
Finally, there's one other area where Sony's software engineers have snatched defeat form the jaws of victory, and that is with the front-end software of the PS3, the so-called Cross Media Bar or XMB. This is very pretty, and seems sensibly laid out - but let's say, for the sake of argument, that you attach a USB hard drive to the machine. First off, unless you have all your stuff in the PS3-approved folder structure (that is to say, music in a folder called MUSIC, movies in a folder called MOVIES, and photos in a folder called something which doesn't appear to work) then the standard viewing setup won't see anything at all. What's REALLY irritating is that even if you do rearrange your media to accommodate this little foible, then the PS3 will only look in one level of subfolders. So for example, each album in my classical music collection is kept in a separate folder, and they are all kept in a 'classical' folder inside my music collection. The PS3, bless it's freakish little semiconducting heart, will look as far as 'music\classical\' and no further. So anything in a subfolder of 'classical' - which is pretty much everything - is invisible.
There is a way round this - pressing the green triangle button and selecting the 'view all' option means you can browse the entire folder structure - but really, this is very poor interface design.
Anyway, that's enough of a rant. It works great as a DVD player, though. And I kind of like it, for reasons which are not really clear to me - I mean, the interface is only moderately good, and aesthetically the external design is weirdly unresolved. So I won't be sending it back. But I'm pretty disappointed. I can only live in hope that Sony's software engineers will remedy some of these failings in future firmware updates.
There is still one radical alternative. Sony actually provide official support for those who wish to install Linux on the PS3 and use it as a computer. I could, if all else fails, install Ubuntu or Yellow Dog Linux, and use the PS3 as a media server that way... but I have one question which I have not yet found the answer to, and that is this: Linux and the PS3's native operating system need separate partitions of the internal hard drive. If I put movies etc. on one partition, can the other OS see it? If I put all my stuff on the PS3 side, will a Linux media server be able to find it? I don't know. In any case, turning to Linux to avoid fiddly little OS foibles seems like going from the frying pan into the industrial furnace.
So, I'm putting my faith in Sony's software engineers. Oh dear.
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