ehandlr Says: May 24th, 2007 at 8:11 am I tried to set up my PS3 to network with my PC but I can’t get it to work right now. I have Windows Media Player 11 and when I go to the share option, it won’t show any devices to share with. Its supposed to show “unkown device” which is the PS3..but I can’t get that to happen..I turned off my firewall and everything.

Henning Says: May 24th, 2007 at 8:13 am Windows Media Player 11 is a DLNA server?

chrysostom Says: May 24th, 2007 at 8:15 am Can anyone tell me the differences between the different upscaling options? I checked the online manual but it wasn’t updated yet.

jwspiker Says: May 24th, 2007 at 8:16 am yeah, i’m curious how you’re doing that with media player 11. I’m running media center edition of XP, and i’m leary to turn that service back on becaue it’s a huge resource hog. Enourmous actually. especially seeing how littel twonky uses. It seems that twonky used to support ACC, but seems like there is some issues with it now. Major bummer. Would be great if Sony would release something here.

Henning Says: May 24th, 2007 at 8:19 am And looky here. Someone’s confirmed my note about DVD upscaling. I think the problem is education – people think that DVD upscaling will magically add detail to a movie. It won’t!

John Says: May 24th, 2007 at 8:27 am The Photo Album 2 is a nice mode, as cute as the original Album one, yet, much more usable (photos properly oriented, rearranging themselves when you zoom in). Zooming in the photo viewer, if a much needed option, is also nicely done, smooth and intuitive via the analog controls. I also think the photos also load faster (I’ve got a few 30+ Mpix panos, with the addition of zooming and panning, they became very enjoyable on the PS3). As a silent upgrade, the backward compatibility (PAL PS3) got improved. Haven’t tried the DVD upscaler yet, but if it’s done well, it could do better than any TV upscaler could, as it will be part of the de-interlacing (that’s what high-end DVD players do). There has been mixed reports on that front wrt HQV scores, need to wait for proper comparison, but the rumourmill says “improved”.

ehandlr Says: May 24th, 2007 at 8:40 am How to stream to the PS3 using Windows Media Player 11 Link.

Segitz Says: May 24th, 2007 at 8:41 am Yep, WMP11 (the one in Vista, also avail for XP) works like a charm with DLNA. Just a bugger… Nearly none of my media is compatible

Tosh Hatch Says: May 24th, 2007 at 8:41 am I don’t understand how to set up TwonkyMedia so the PS3 will see it ….. any ideas ?

Henning Says: May 24th, 2007 at 8:46 am ehandlr: that link doesn’t work anymore. Tosh: I’m going to try it tonight, and report my findings.

Segitz Says: May 24th, 2007 at 8:48 am Henning… Number 6 also applies to myself… At University, we have to use a VPN client, which there still is none for the PSP yet (I still hope, someone ports over openvpn or such). Our University line does 6megabytes per second flawlessly^^ Most interesting is, my cheapo Samsung tv DOES support WTW and the higher color depth!! Very very nice! I love this firmware!

Gary Says: May 24th, 2007 at 8:50 am I haven’t downloaded the firmware yet. Will probably do it soon but not much of this update will mean anything to me until I get an HDTV.

PSNID=Lifendz Says: May 24th, 2007 at 8:54 am So wait, I still can’t use a custom icon for my online avatar? Darn .

Lakuma Says: May 24th, 2007 at 9:13 am Here are some other Server Software other than TwonkaMedia. I don’t know if they work yet with firmware 1.8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upnp#UPnP_AV_MediaServers Good Luck.

Sporty Says: May 24th, 2007 at 9:36 am I’m stuck on Vista since i bought a new computer a few months ago. (Hate vista btw) But setting up media sharing was simple. Just enable media sharing and go. No need to install anything. WMP11 is suppose to be the same way since it’s DLNA compliant. DVD upscaler is actually pretty sweet and does a good job. Some movies work better then others, but it noticeably reduced grain in quite a few DVDs. You can turn it on and off and play with the setting while watching a movie since Image enhancement is also under the DVD options you get when pressing triangle. Good way to check it out in real time. Overall pretty sweet. Now if they added a few more codecs it would rock.

MetalProxy Says: May 24th, 2007 at 10:30 am They finally changed the blue cursor to a bigger green cursor. Now it wont see like Iam going blind. Iam at work so I cant check out all the other goodies. I sure hope the upscaling for PS1 and PS2 games works good. I dontnow about you guys, Iam happy about the update.

SincereXai Says: May 24th, 2007 at 12:31 pm I haven’t downloaded it yet. But usually I’m quiet surprised with the outcome of the firmware updates that Sony releases. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the rumors floating around Firmware 2.0 are true. If it is then I’ll roll over. But it looks as though we won’t be getting it for a while at this rate.

Lakuma Says: May 24th, 2007 at 12:48 pm For those interested in streaming AVI’s be sure to check this out: http://www.maxconsole.net/?mode=news&newsid=17178

Jimmy Stewart Says: May 24th, 2007 at 2:08 pm I have a question about upscaling. I admit I’m completely ignorant on the issue. First is all HDTVs automatically upscale images, why do they sell upscaling DVD players? Again I suppose to those who’s TVs suck at it. It just seems like there wouldn’t be a market if upscaling players didn’t do something. Second. If upscaling of DVDs doesn’t make much difference since the TV automatically upscales the image… why isn’t this true for the video games. How would the TV know to upscale a DVD image and not a video game image. Shouldn’t it upscale everything? I ask this mostly out of curiosity as I heard it when upscaling came to the 360 and didn’t properly understand it. All I know is that upscaling movies to 1080P made a night and day difference on my 360. Wait, that bring up a third question. When I played a movie before the update, my TV info would say it was being played at 480P. When I played a movie after the update it would show my display info as 1080P. This is also true for the PS games I’ve played on my PS3. Before the update they were all 480P now they display as 1080P. Assuming my TV was upscaling them all automatically in the first place… why would it change the display information?

Henning Says: May 24th, 2007 at 2:30 pm They sell upscaling DVD players exactly for the reason you state: if the scaler in the DVD player is better than that in the TV, then you’ll get a better picture. Re: video games. Well, you can let the TV upscale your video game imagery, just like we do for DVD’s. I was doing just that before this firmware update came out. The thing is, the PS3 knows more about the game-sourced image than just the image. It is doing the rendering to the image in the first place, and has more control over the whole process. So the console can do more things to the image when it’s being upscaled.

John Says: May 24th, 2007 at 4:05 pm There is upscaling and upscaling, as an example of what difference there is between a bad and a good upscaler/deinterlacer, you can have a look at the comparison images in that article http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2088534,00.asp I hope we’ll see some PS3 vs high-end DVD upscaler articles in the next days…

mcloki Says: May 24th, 2007 at 6:43 pm Just updated. For Mac users Elgato works great to stream content. But it’s limited right now to mpeg 1 and 2 movies. No itunes music is making it across. Here’s hoping that Apple makes Quicktime and itunes a DLNA compliant. That would be great. I’ll post about the mac trouble on my site that also show you how to transfer files to the PS3 hard drive. www dot cinzar dot com And the next thing. I updated and thought my machine “Bricked” Damn I thought. So after a frantic half hour of searching the web i found a thread at AVs on my tv Model Samsung 4095 and found an answer. If you turn on 24hz playback on the PS3 sometimes the PS3 won’t sync/handshake with the monitor and you get no picture. If your monitor is blank playing a Bluray for the first time after the update. Please check this turn it off and everything should be back to normal. Remember Never panic. All the other stuff I’ve got to check out now. GT4 looked good. Must check out FF12 and Rouge Galaxy.

Jimmy Stewart Says: May 25th, 2007 at 7:03 am Thanks very much for the explanations Henning & John. It’s really appreciated. Is it possible that my HDTV isn’t upscaling at all as it’s not technically a TV but an HD monitor? As I said before I notice huge differences between upscaled content on my 360 and non-upscaled content. The same appears true with my series 3 Tivo… it doesn’t have any upscaling capability and the standard definition programs are almost unwatchable! John, the images in the link John provided seem to be a bit slanted. Please correct me if I’m wrong but it appears to be a comparison between a high end DVD player ($800 from the sound of the comments) compared to a $400 gaming console that doesn’t seem to be properly configured. It’s not terribly clear in the link how the 360 is configured… but based upon a what little they did specify and the comments it would seem they’re using 480P playback on a console that is capable of upscaling to 1080P. Again I’m not entirely up to speed with all this scaling stuff… but that seems a bit unfair to me. If they regularly compare equipment like this I’d imagine a PS3 review would probably be over component cables at 480P… even though like the 360 it’s capable of 1080P using different cables. I’d be very interested if they’d do the same comparison over with the 360 over VGA at 1080P. That was the point at which I noticed a fairly major difference in my picture quality. At the very least it looks like my TV must have a horrible scaler. Perhaps I should look into one of those standalone scalers that I’ve heard talked about on the AVS forums.

John Says: May 25th, 2007 at 7:20 am The article give info about the setup details earlier in the test http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2088533,00.asp “We chose to use component cables to hook up the Xbox 360 [...] If you buy the VGA cable, you can upscale DVDs to HD resolutions; we’ve tried this before, and it absolutely does not fix any of the problems we’ll highlight here. To make sure we have a fair comparison, we set our Denon DVD player to output 480p as well.” So both were at 480p, meaning they were comparing the deinterlacing features only (DVDs are 480i). The upscaling in 360 didn’t improve anything, meaning it was probably just stretching the 480p output. IIRC the PS3 in January was getting 73/130 in the HQV test (360 got 20, a cheap DVD player gets 35, high-end and nVidia/ATI get 100+).

Pc Says: May 26th, 2007 at 9:07 am I love that i can now play PS2 and PS1 games in HD !!

Jimmy Stewart Says: May 27th, 2007 at 5:16 pm Interesting. I missed the specific details about the test. Thanks for the re-link. Still hard to argue with what I’m seeing. I suppose that’s what these tests are designed for. All I know is my 360 has yet to fail me going up against anything else in terms of watching movies in general (including the PS3 with the recent update). The picture just looks better to me. Maybe I’m not looking at the right stuff, I dunno. Anyone know if it’s possible that my HDTV isn’t upscaling as it isn’t an HDTV but rather and HD monitor?

John Cruthfield Says: June 1st, 2007 at 6:56 am It doesn’t surprise me that most of the websites, even all of the editors of Playstation-Fanboy say that this firmware update is a disappointment. I agree with all of the editors and all of the people who say this really is a disappointment, because the graphic performance is actually hurt in many ways. Yesterday I explained things from a technical point of view and made comparisons. Today I can do the same, but also with added knowledge about what the firmware update is actually like. Yesterday I was explaining things based on technical terms and comparisons. Today I can do the same, but I have also added some information based on the PS3 firmware update after a day of experience with a 1080p HDTV set. People asked for a better explanation about what all this means, so I decided to explain the facts. A lot of people have been asking about what this means for the PS3, and how it compares to other game systems along with other DVD players and HDTV sets. I have done quite a bit of research on the subject. I have copied-and-pasted some information, I did some re-wording, and I added some thoughts of my own. The game system that directly competes with the Playstation 3 is the Xbox 360. There are a few times it is useful to compare the two systems later in the article, but I will do so from the beginning to keep things in perspective from both sides at all times. First I will talk about games, and comparisons with similar systems. Xbox 360 is better than the Playstation 3 in terms of resolution and resolution upconversion, for several fundamental reasons: 1. Xbox 360 has a true hardware chip that is fully dedicated to resolution upconversion; it is much more flexible. The Xbox 360 doesn’t just “Smooth” edges by turning down the Sharpness, like the PS3 does. The Xbox 360 actually applies 4x Anti-Aliasing so the Sharpness can remain high at all times, yet still eliminate visible jagged lines and pixels. The Xbox 360 allows games or movies to be upconverted to 720p, 1080i, or 1080p, depending on what kind of HDTV you have. The Playstation 3 really seems to be having a lot of reported problems when people select 480p as the resolution they want to upconvert. We tested this update on each of the different television types. On the 720p HDTV set we tested, there was a very slight improvement. There appeared to be less of an improvement, if any, on the 1080i HDTV set we experimented with. When we tested the Playstation 3 on our 1080p HDTV set, which is a Samsung HL-5687W, we were not surprised to see that there was no improvement at all. The reason for this is because the Samsung HDTV set already was upconverting resolution to 1080p all along. In the past it was very annoying how we would always have to turn the Sharpness all the way down while playing older PS2 and PS1 games on any of the HDTV sets, because the jagged lines and pixels were so visible. With this Firmware 1.8 update the PS3 removes a tremendous amount of Sharpness from the games when the Smoother is turned on, but in all honesty there is way too much Sharpness removed, which causes the games to look much too blurry in an annoying way. 2. The Playstation 3 does not have a hardware upscaling chip. The firmware update is working with the PS3 CPU in a way that uses Floating Point processing in a way that isn’t flexible; in fact, it is actually watered down and offers diluted performance, regardless of the resolution. This is likely the reason why this firmware update is apparently only fully compatible with 1080p HDTV sets. Yesterday I wrote, “To be fair, we will likely see future firmware updates that allow 720p and 1080i compatibility, if it isn’t already included.” Today I can report that there are plenty of problems being reported with 720p and 1080i HDTV sets, so it appears not all of the bugs have been worked out of the 720p and 1080i HDTV sets. Different reports are coming in from North American and Europe with errors based on how the games are cropped and whether or not they work properly. However, not all “upconversions” are created equally. Nothing compares to dedicated performance from the appropriate type of processor. If you watch a cartoon, you will think the PS3 is doing a great job of upconverting. However, when you watch movies like Tomorrow Never Dies, you will quickly realize the Playstation 3 doesn’t do a good job of upconverting DVD movies when the scenes are more complex. 3. We also need to remember that the upconversion does not help the Playstation 3 with the cables included with the Playstation 3 system. The only way Playstation 3 owners will be able to take advantage of this feature is if they buy cables sold as accessories. The cables included with the Playstation 3 system won’t allow these updates to be used. Although a Component cable will allow the games to be seen at the higher resolution, the only way standard DVDs can be seen higher than 480p is through the use of an HDMI cable or a VGA cable, because copyright restrictions prevent a Component cable from carrying anything higher than 480p for a standard DVD signal. This is a shame, because 75% of all PS3 owners only use the cables provided with their system. That isn’t a surprise, because most people believe that when they are spending $600 they are probably getting everything they need. Sadly, that isn’t the case with the Playstation 3. 4. Xbox 360 upgrades all original Xbox games to 720p, 1080i, or 1080p, depending on what type of HDTV you have. But the Xbox 360 also upgrades the original Xbox forms of Anti-Aliasing used to 4x Anti-Aliasing. The reason there is a need for increased Anti-Aliasing with the older games is because their Native Resolution is 480p. When a 480p game is running in a higher resolution, it will need better Anti-Aliasing, otherwise, it would actually look worse when seen on an HDTV. Thankfully, the hardware engineers of the Xbox 360 realized this from the beginning, which is why original Xbox games look so much better when you play them on any type of HDTV. 5. The problem with PS1 and PS2 games is the fact that the PS1 and PS2 hardware did not include any form of Anti-Aliasing. This is likely the reason why Sony didn’t mention any type of Anti-Aliasing upgrade that would be applied when the games have their resolution upconverted. After all, there is no form of Anti-Aliasing to upgrade, because no Anti-Aliasing existed in the first place with PS1 and PS2 games. The major problem with playing a PS1 or PS2 game with Native Resolution of 320×240 or 640×480 on a 1080p HDTV set is that there are going to be very noticeable pixels and jagged lines, more noticeable than ever, in an unsatisfactory way! 6. Yesterday I wrote “It may not be an exaggeration to say that when you play PS1 or PS2 games on your 1080p HDTV, you will likely need to turn the Sharpness all the way down every time you play a game. If you don’t turn the Sharpness down, you will likely be very disappointed with all the pixels and jagged lines you see. People used to make fun of games like Tekken Tag Tournament on the Playstation 2, because of all the jagged lines. A lot of the magazines called it “Tekken Jag Tournament.” Jagged lines that were noticeable on PS1 and PS2 games are going to be VERY noticeable when seen on the Playstation 3 on a 1080p HDTV. The PS2 was the only system that didn’t include anti-aliasing in the hardware last generation. It’s unfortunate that what Sony thought at the time was a money-saving decision to not include anti-aliasing in the Playstation 2 hardware would continue hurting future Playstation game systems.” Today I can say that with the Smoother feature turned on there is no “need” to take the time to turn the Sharpness all the way down on your HDTV set each time you play a PS2 or PS1 game. However, there may still be a “want” for you to do so. The reason I say this is because when the Smoother is turned on it is essentially automatically removing a large amount of Sharpness from the games. The problem is that when the Smoother is turned on there is far too much Sharpness being removed from the games. The Smoother eliminates a lot of the jagged lines, but it also removes the quality of the textures, because all of the textures in the games become much too blurry. Many people believe it’s actually better to leave the Smoother off, so the texture quality isn’t affected, and take the time to turn the Sharpness down every time you play a PS2 or PS1 game. It can get very annoying turning the Sharpness down, and then back up, each time you play a PS1 or PS2 game on your PS3, but in many ways it is better to do that than it is to use the Smoother, because the Smoother blurs out such a large percentage of texture quality. Situations like this almost make me happy that a lot of games out there, like Guitar Hero, still don’t work properly on the Playstation 3. The reason I say that is because it motivates me to forget about using the PS3 to play older games on, and it motivates me to just keep my PS2 to play on the Standard-Definition TV it was meant to be played on. Plus, when I play PS2 games on my PS2 rather than my PS3, I get to use all of the cool rumble features in the PS2 controller. I agree with the millions of people out there who think it’s a shame the way the PS3 doesn’t let us use rumble in the controller, even when we play PS2 or PS1 games. 7. Yesterday I wrote: “As bad as PS2 games will look on a 1080p HDTV set, the PS1 games will look even worse. Last generation, the PS2, Gamecube, and Xbox all used excellent forms of pixel filtration so that you didn’t see all sorts of pixilation when you walked too close to an enemy or wall. Although the N64 game system did use Tri-Linear Mip-Map Interpolation to eliminate pixilation in games like Mario 64, the Playstation and Saturn did not have access to similar types of pixel filtration. As a result, Playstation and Saturn games often pixilated when you walked too close to an enemy, an object, or wall. When PS1 games are played on an 1080p HDTV set, it will become very clear to people that it is literally better to use a Standard TV to play PS1 and PS2 games than it is to use an HDTV, because the HDTV will make all of those flaws so very noticeable that the games are not fun to play because the graphics looks so annoyingly poor.” Today, I can say that when you play with the Smoother turned off my theory was 100% correct. The reason I say that is because I knew what PS2 and PS1 games would look like on a 1080p HDTV set all along, because I have a Samsung HL-S5687W that upconverts everything to 1080p. When the Smoother is turned on, the PS1 and PS2 games have a lot of the visible pixels and jagged lines removed, but they are removed at the expense of the texture quality in the games. The Smoother removes far too much texture quality in the game, because it “blurs out” so much of the detail, by removing so much of the Sharpness in the game. 8. Sony has experienced, and continues to experience a lot of major problems with the resolution of actual Playstation 3 games. For example, the “1080i Resolution Problem,” does still exist with the Playstation 3. Any of the millions of people who own an HDTV with a Native Resolution of 1080i will end up seeing their Playstation 3 games in 480p Standard-Definition resolution, rather than 720p or 1080i High-Definition resolution. The reason for this is because the Playstation 3 does not include a hardware chip dedicated to the upconversion of resolution, like the Xbox 360 does. With the Xbox 360, you simply select the resolution you want the system to output, and it works fine. But with the Playstation 3, if you have an HDTV set with 1080i Native Resolution, you really are screwed in a lot of ways. Only Playstation 3 games with a Native Resolution of 1080p will work appropriately with a 1080i HDTV, because the 1080p resolution can be selected in the game, and it will then be downcoverted to 1080i. The problem is, almost all of the Playstation 3 games available have a Native Resolution of 720p. Since the PS3 does not have a resolution upconversion chip, it will try to send a 720p signal to the 1080i HDTV. When the 1080i HDTV doesn’t accept the signal, the PS3 will then downgrade the signal to 480p. This means you are playing PS3 games at the same resolution as your PS2 games. Sony needs to get their hardware re-resolution problems fixed with the Playstation 3 before they starting worrying about the PS1 and PS2. It has now been confirmed the adjustments talked about here for the PS1 and PS2 have frustrated and disappointed a lot of people, because in many ways the games look worse with all of the “blurrying” that occurs, which removes far too much Sharpness detail and texture quality. The necessary Anti-Aliasing and pixel filtration techniques are not being used, so this watered-down upconversion process for the games really is offering only diluted performance that is very disappointing, just like all of the editors at the Playstation-Fanboy website said.

Marc Says: June 9th, 2007 at 8:51 am does the 1.8 include all the previous versions and when the ps3 is turned on through hdmi does it dettect the hd tv and switch on to the ps3 channel

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