The “Break it Down” Blog

Ted Regulski just dropped this gem in my inbox about the PS3 1.80 Firmware update due tommorow!

• Upscaling Playstation, Playstation 2 and DVDs to 1080p
• Ability to stream Images, Music, Movies from a DLNA3-enabled (UPnP A/V) device
• Remote Play on PSP over the Internet (Basically allows you to play anything from PS3, using PSP, from anywhere with a internet connection)

I’m sorry but this falls directly into the category of “Hot Damn!“. For those of you that read this blog you know that the longer I’ve had my PS3 the fonder I have grown of it.

The quality of the 1080p output is fantastic, the computer-like functionality that Sony bragged about that I dismissed has turned out to be truly awesome (e.g. for an ‘audio device’ you don’t have to buy any special vendor headset like Microsoft… I just used my phone’s Bluetooth headset and synced it with my PS3). But, my favorite part is that the platform is starting to really flex it’s muscles with it’s power and will only continue to do so moving forward over the next 4 years as we see the XBox run into a glass ceiling which will likely only be corrected with their 65nm refresh before Christmas this year.

In the past you may remember one of the biggest things I wanted out of my console (XBox or PS3) was the ability to stream media to it and play it from a UPnP A/V-enabled device. At the time I was concerned with the console supporting the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+

Because it’s one of the most popular (and highest rated) UPnP A/V-enabled personal NAS servers on the market. It looked like the XBox 360 might be able to do it, but after further investigation it seems Microsoft not only locks the XBox 360 to the WMV format, but it also implements a proprietary extension to the UPnP A/V specification, making it incompatible with anything else on the market except a Media Center PC or running TVersity off of a computer (NOTE: I’ve used TVersity with it, and it’s buggy at best, stuttering and skipping playing towards the last minute of whatever you are watching every time).

Now it looks like the PS3 is going to dominate in this arena. First off it supports about 5x more A/V formats than the XBox 360 and now with this 1.80 firmware update will allow you to interact with a specification-compliant UPnP A/V device to stream those movies to it. That is just too sexy.

Update #1: If you are trying to stream media using your NAS or TwonkyVision to the PS3 and having problems, it looks like Twonky has released a 4.4 Beta 1 release that fixes PS3 playback issues.

Update #2: Using the ReadyNAS directly to stream to the PS3 has problems aparently. While folks are mentioning success after installing TwonkyMedia ($40), the ReadyNAS is suppose to be a fully compliant UPnP A/V server, so some folks are understandably annoyed. The Infrant team doesn’t think it’s likely to fix anything until RAIDiator 4 is released.