Got them ol’ Blu Ray blues

A couple of weeks ago, Twilight came out on video. Not that the I was eagerly awaiting its release or anything, but the wife was, which meant that I was facing a couple of hours watching a chick-flick if I expected to fulfil my ‘conjugal rights’ later that night.  Still, I reasoned, it could be worse – it was a ‘vampire movie’, right?  That’s basically horror. (Although Shaun of the Dead, is a zombie movie, so also horror, and that didn’t exactly strike a romantic chord…).

I’ve spent the past couple of years gradually ‘training’ the wife in the art of high definition.  After much cajoling, she’ll now watch the 1080 HD version of a channel, instead of blithely sitting through the grainy 720 broadcast.  So I was somewhat proud when I saw that she’d bought the Blu Ray version of Twilight instead of picking up the regular DVD equivalent.  Sadly, what happened next undid all of my good work.

About an hour and a half into the movie (and just when the action steps up a notch), the screen froze.  I took out the disk and made sure it was clean, rebooted the PlayStation 3 (which is our Blu Ray player), and tried again.  I jumped to the scene we were on and tried again.  This time it managed to get ten minutes further before it gave up entirely.  I rebooted and this time it refused to recognize the disk.  I tried another movie – same problem.  Then a game.  Nothing.

So I go online and check the Sony website, and after exhausting their list of ‘possible things that might have gone wrong’, determine that I need to send it in for repair. I also do a quick search of the Internet and discover that this is a fairly common problem with PlayStation 3s. I also mentioned the problem to the only other person I know with a PS3 and he confirmed that his did the same thing, and had to send his in for repair, too, so this isn’t just an isolated incident. In fact, it seems to be almost expected, which is just shocking for a $400 piece of equipment (or $600 as it was when early-adopter me bought mine…). Anyway, for $150 paid up-front, Sony promised to look at it and even sent me a purpose-built box (yet another sign of a regular problem) in which I could ship it to them. Which I did, leaving the wife and I in suspense as to what happens during the last half an hour of Twilight.

So whilst I have nothing else to do until its return, I thought I’d have a quick bitch and moan about the PlayStation 3. In general, it’s a great piece of kit, and I’ve really enjoyed the games I’ve played on it. But beyond its use as a game console and occasional Blu-Ray player, it’s actually pretty shite.

My biggest beef is with the Internet Browser. My PS3 is connected to the Internet via my home wireless network. Although the primary benefit of this is to be able to download firmware updates (I’m not really one for online multi-player gaming), it would be useful to be able to flip to the Internet and check the news headlines, or browse the TV listings, or even stream programs right from the TV network’s website, all from the comfort of the sofa. Unfortunately the browser is such a piece of crap that browsing anything is an exercise in frustration. The browser gives you the option to display everything really large, which has you panning around the visible portion of the screen, or displaying everything even larger, requiring even more panning around.  It doesn’t seem to handle HTML too well at all – let alone Flash – there is no dynamic resizing, content doesn’t wrap within the visible window (which doesn’t even take up the full screen, which is a waste of a 50″ TV), and you can’t even change from page view to column view. In fact, my old Sony-Ericsson K790i mobile phone had a better browser than this. Given that there are some very good free browsers available now, I see no reason why Sony couldn’t bundle something a bit more usable with the system.

The other thing it is difficult to get the hang of with the browser is entering a URL (website address)  – assuming you can figure out how to do this – there’s no ‘address bar’ like you get in every other browser in the world. The on-screen keyboard has you navigating to keys with the joystick and then clicking on them, which is laborious and irritating, even with the ‘prediction’. I also bought the remote control (an expensive optional extra) – it would have been handy if this came with at least a phone-style alphanumeric keypad (you know, with ABC on the 2 key, DEF on the 3 key, and so on) but nooo… The one cool thing about the remote is that it is Bluetooth (not infra-red) which means that you don’t have to physically point it at the box to work it – although it’s really difficult to get out of the habit of pointing it anyway as it’s exactly the same shape as a regular remote control (So why on earth did they not make it tablet-shaped and just put a full QWERTY keyboard on it, then??). Handily, I already had a Bluetooth keyboard from my old HP iPaq, so I reasoned I could just use that. Sadly, the PS3 just threw an “unrecognized device” error which ruled out that possibility. So much for an open-source standard!

One thing that did excite me about the PS3 was that it can be connected to a network. Not that I have any great desire to play online games against a bunch of (other) geeks, but I do have my own wireless network. I had this vision of being able to rip movies to my PC (or the Network Drive that I now have), and then play them via the PS3 – removing the risk of the kids scuffing/losing the DVDs. The first problem was that the PS3 would only recognize Windows Media Servers, so I had to (re)install Windows Media Player (which I’d removed in favor of iTunes) and configure WMS on the back of that, just so the PS3 could find my content. Unfortunately, even though the PS3 could find the ‘server’, it refused to recognize any format that I ripped to. Even the supposedly universal MP4 format wouldn’t play, coming back with a “data type is not supported” error. Before I sent my PS3 back for repair I downloaded Twilight to my laptop (the Blu Ray disk came with a free iTunes download, no piracy for me!) but when I tried to play this via the PlayStation, I just got a “File is corrupted” message – which its not; I could play it perfectly well on my laptop (which I HDMI’d to the TV…).  I accept that there may well be some settings that I’ve missed, but I’m not exactly a technical Luddite, and if I can’t work it out after two weeks of trying, it’s just too damn hard, and I give up.  I did finally get it to recognize some .avi files after a couple of firmware updates, but the buffering between the PS3 and my network drive was so bad that the video was constantly breaking up, juddering, freezing, and ultimately entirely unwatchable.  (Whereas between my PC and the network drive it was seamless, so it’s not a network issue…).  So another worthless feature, there…

Although I have an Apple Airport connected to my hi-fi so that I can play all of my MP3s through my main stereo, I did think it would be nice if I could do so on the TV, via the PS3 (as a precursor to getting a surround-sound set-up and some SACD CDs). I figured I would maybe even be able to look at the cover art, much as I can in iTunes. Again, no such luck. Although the PS3 (thankfully) managed to find the music, the interface is awful - worse than a $10 text-only MP3 player. You can browse through artist/album folders, and select a file to play it, but then you have to just sit there staring at the standard irritating Sony ‘wave’ – what a waste of a 1080p screen, and all that PS3 processing power! If Sony insist on you having Windows Media Server on the back-end PC, why couldn’t they at least bundle Windows Media Player on the PS3?

Today, my PlayStation 3 arrived back (much to Finn’s relief as he got Skate 2 for his birthday and hadn’t been able to try it out for over a week). Sony had had it for less than 24 hours (3 days to get there, 1 day to process, and 3 to get back again – the wonders of UPS tracking!) so I’m guessing that they didn’t really do much in the way of investigation. Which again implies that this issue is so common that as soon as someone reports a “problem with the Blu Ray player” they just replace the whole assembly, unquestioningly.  And, much to my surprise (and relief, as I’ve got all my game progress saved to the hard drive) it is the same unit and not just a refurbished replacement. Although of course it had been away so long the home network had forgotten about it, and the Bluetooth remote was no longer talking to it (and I can’t remember how to pair them again…).

Still, at least now maybe I can finally see that last 30 minutes of Twilight, although I’m guessing that after 2 weeks the moment has passed, with regard to my romantic night in front of a chick-flick.  Ho hum, at least I still have Resistance…  Maybe I should just consider this a lesson learned, and stick to using the PlayStation only for what it is good for – playing games.

One response to “Got them ol’ Blu Ray blues”

  1. interrobang » Blog Archive » You can’t have a CONsumer without the con

    […] Put paying out a couple of grand every 3 years seems a little excessive. Unfortunately it really does seem that things just aren’t built to last. A couple of weeks after my TV died, my PlayStation 3 also gave up the ghost and wouldn’t power on any more. This is a problem I’ve had before (it is an extremely common problem with PS3s – I have 2 friends who have had exactly the same problem -where something gets too hot and kills the whole machine). Last time was about 18 months after I bought it (for $400, being an early adopter…), and they got it repaired and back to me pretty quickly (just swapped out the blown circuit board, I guess). That was about 18 months ago, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when it went out again. I called Sony who said they would repair it for $180. I coughed. They then said they could send me a ‘refurbished’ (i.e. faulty but repaired) new, slim model for only $150 in part exchange, which sounded like a reasonable deal until I discovered that the new PS3s can’t play the old PS2 games (which the ‘fat’ model can – so now you know what that extra inch is doing…), which is no good as Gil wouldn’t be able to play Destroy All Humans, which is his favorite game as you get to electrocute cops (I do worry about that boy…). So I plumped for the repair option. […]

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