Ravings on CS, OSs, PLs, SF, and other things geeky...

It was early this year that I decided to finally jump on the high definition DVD bandwagon, to finally take a stand and sink some of my hard earned dough on stuff like HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (BR) disks. My first act was to exchange a Blade Runner DVD I got for Christmas for it’s HD-DVD counterpart.

Not a good idea I hear you say? Well, in my mind I was planning to get a combo BR/HD-DVD player so I could circumvent this whole silly format war business. Personally I favoured HD-DVD since it was more in line with the DVD image, more consumer friendly with no region coding and backup options and lastly it was not from Sony. This plan was soon shattered as the HD-DVD camp lost the wind in their sails when Warner Brothers abandoned the format, and my vision of an all playing happy-monster combo was ruined.

Oh, well… at least having just one format was going to save me some of that dough. I did a quick look around for BR players, and it was easy. The best one on the marked was apparently non other then the infamous Playstation 3. I decided to order one of their cheaper models and give it a spin. A month later, with a brand new silver PS3 hitting the streets it arrived at my doorstep.

My first disappointment came soon enough though when I noted that this High Definition Cadillac only came with a crappy composite video cable giving a not-so-glorious 480p cross-bleeding-from-hell kind of a picture. My second one came when it refused to recognize my USB wireless keyboard so I could type the rather tedious 25 character security key for my wireless network. This was made even harder by the fact that it treated this key like a password and hid every character I typed in. I’m pretty sure I trust anyone watching that screen with that number but still I couldn’t turn off this obfuscation. After a good while fumbling with the controller I got it connected. Next up was connecting it to my media. Happily the PS3 supports DLNA UPnP media players and after some googling I found three open source contenders: gmediaplayer, ushare and mediatomb. I tried them all and in that order.

Gmediaplayer was simple to compile but is not actively maintained and whatever contents it put up the PS3 refused. Second up was ushare from the GeeXboX project. It seems to be based on gmediaplayer and while it’s documentation suggest it should work with the PS3, I just got unsupported data from it. Mediatomb had more dependencies and took a while to compile on my ARM file server box. Once working however it did the job, relaying various home videos to the PS3 successfully. It did however die mysteriously when given access to my music and image collections, sending out a short ‘Killed’ before terminating. Hopefully I will be able to track down the vicious murderer soon enough.

Now it was time to try out some video. I threw some DVDs at the PS3 but it refused to play most of mine which are Region 1 discs and it even refused to play PAL Region 2 discs. Another strange thing is that it lists a Region code for PS1/PS2 games, even though it doesn’t even support PS2 games. Guess I am screwed as well if I have some old PS1 games. Why on earth Sony wasted time and resources on implementing such a non-feature boggles my mind, perhaps they don’t want to cut into their multi market PS1 sales niche. Sony further bothered consumers over the world with a new region BR encoding schema. I was mildly thankful that this Region A player at least included both Japan and the USA so I was able to order some discs from Amazon.com. I am sure I will curse this non-feature in the future. Not being content with a 480 resolution, I trodded out to my local video store and picked up some D4 Terminal connectors which I was able to hook up to my projector and this took me up to a 1080i resolution. The highest supported by my projector and the PS3 through non HDMI connectors. It flatly refused to upscale the few Japanese DVDs I had. I guess you need HDMI for that too. Still at 1080i my first BR disc, Michael Clayton looked pretty spiffy, with a noticeably greater sharpness and film like quality of the image compared with DVD which now falls in the old FuzzyVision category. I had to set the Audio-out to bitstream to get full Dolby 5.1 and once that was enabled it sounded pretty good. I have more discs coming and look forward to watching. While the PS3, packed with non-features, is far from being a consumer nirvana it is a good BR player and though this post is probably on the negative side I must say that the PS3 looks nice, has a good interface and eventually it even accepted my USB keyboard so at under 40K yen it’s not a bad deal.