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One more time without Freeview please?...
For $169.95, PlayTV turns your PS3 into an HD PVR. And they’re bundling a 250GB PS3 with PlayTV for $599. Looks like a clear bargain, you’d think — and another step in the PS3’s advance to home entertainment status beyond gaming. Any problems?
First the good. The small PlayTV USB peripheral (above right) has two HD tuners. That means you can receive all digital TV channels, including HD ones. It gives the usual PVR functionality of pausing live TV and watching on ‘chase’. It has a full 8-day EPG so you can easily schedule recordings, and the EPG is very well designed. Timer recordings will fire even if the PS3 is left in standby mode, and you can record while playing a game — although this may be close to straining hard-drive speeds since there are warnings that gameplay or recording quality may be affected.
A major bonus is that you can use a PSP to log onto your PS3 remotely (anywhere with Wi-Fi) and can then set recordings or watch shows already recorded, whether you’re in the next room or another country.
Meanwhile back at home, if you have a PS3 BD remote, PlayTV comes with a neat stick-on overlay to relabel its buttons (although it would have been even more clever if you could actually read the dark blue legends on the black background).
Last in the plus column, Freeviewendorsement means that PlayTV is futureproofed against MPEG4 broadcasts, assuming Australia ever takes the extraordinary decision to broadcast new channels in a format that nearly all current digital TV equipment (which is MPEG2) can’t receive.
Now the bad. Despite having twin tuners, you can record from only one of them. You can watch another channel on the other one, but so can anyone with a digital TV. This should be considered a single-tuner PVR, and not compared with twin-tuner models.
The PlayTV peripheral has no loop output for your aerial, and if you follow Sony’s connection instructions, you effectively disable your TV’s own tuner. You won’t be able to watch telly direct on your TV unless you buy an aerial splitter and possibly a signal-boost amplifier.
Owners of PS3s with a 60GB or 80GB hard drive won’t have much space for HD recordings (which can use 2GB to 6GB per hour). Upgrading the PS3 hard drive is fairly easy and doesn’t void warranty, so consider including a larger drive in your purchase decision. Remember to back up your game data before swapping out!
Now the sad. Sony Australia has been persuaded to make PlayTV Freeview compliant in Australia. (A late-in-the-day decision? There were images in the media pack both with and without the Freeview logo.) Freeview is a consortium of the free-to-air broadcasters, and one of its key goals is to protect TV ad revenue by stopping viewers skipping ads. So Freeview compliance means removing ad-skip buttons from PVRs, as well as throttling fast-forward speeds and disabling the export of recordings in any form that might leave the home network.
To apply these conditions to the PlayStation 3 breaks our heart. The PS3 is a media player par excellence. Even with .avi files, the PS3 can scoot through at 120x FF; hit the square key and the PS3 normally gives you active thumbnails of the entire video for thrillingly simple 1, 2 or 5-minute jumps. To go Freeview-compliant, all this has been removed. The jump has been changed from an ad-skip-friendly one minute to a full 10 minutes, while maximum FF is slashed to Freeview’s required 30x — so it takes four times as long to move through a lengthy recording. (Though we must say having the 30x FF mapped to the SIXAXIS controller’s R2 button is great, like a turbo booster!)
In other countries PlayTV can export recordings to the PS3’s home menu and then out to a USB stick (and into a PC). The files are in an AVCHD format that plays very nicely in Windows Media Player or VLC. But the ability to export has been removed for Australia, again in order to have Freeview compliance.
Geeks may discover they can reactivate all these abilities by going to Settings and selecting ‘Other’ instead of Australia. This cancels your timers and forces a re-tune, but you regain 1-minute skips, 120x FF, and, very usefully, ‘Move to Home Menu’, which exports any recordings you’ve made to the XMB (under Video). From there you can put them on a USB stick and use them anyway. Hoorah. To make new recordings, you return to Australia and retune again. Useful, but quite a palaver.
The Freeview hobbling of such fine media functionality is a terrible disappointment — it makes the Australian PlayTV very hard to recommend to your average consumer. Some PVR makers empower their customers by offering a choice of Freeview and non-Freeview models. If Sony were to offer a non-Freeview PlayTV option, well, that might be quite the best bargain in town.
www.playtvps3.com
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