Playstation 3

This is a little late in coming because I didn't create a page last year when we got our first Playstation 3 in the house. We originally bought it because we wanted a Blu-Ray player to go with our 106" big screen TV that we got back in 2006.

While shopping around at the time the Blu-Ray players were very expensive and the Playstation 3 was the cheapest of the lot. So to me, it was like buying the Blu-Ray player and getting a game console for free. how could I go wrong?

So back in December of 2006 we got our first Playstation 3 and instantly fell in love with it. The Blu-Ray quality was fantastic. At least on some movies. Some just don't seem all that much better but I think it is the type of movie that makes the higher quality stand out. It isn't that they don't all have good quality, it is just that some movies you just don't notice the quality because it has no real impact on the story.

Well, we started gaming which we normally don't do a lot of. Well, Tammy does on her computer but the Nintendo just sits most of the time. So with the new Playstation 3, started playing on the big screen and got hooked pretty quickly. We have several games and the two that get played the most right now are Oblivion and Motorstorm. We have several we downloaded too.

This gaming caused a problem. We only have one player so we can play games and watch movies on another TV at the same time. Heart breaking. So we went out this year and bought our second Playstation 3. We now have the 60 and 80 gig versions in the same house.

They both play regular DVD and Blu-Ray and they are both connected to high-def TVs so they look really good. As an added bonus we can play online games againes each other as long as we have 2 copies of the games. This is a real bonus for the games we downloaded by the way, pay for them once and are allowed by Sony to download them to both systems. All totally legal and in their download licensing agreement. I think it is actually intended for cases where you sell or otherwise dispose of one system and buy a replacement but how many people actually own multiple Playstation 3 units in the same house? I mean if it was on a disk I could use the game on both machines so why not the downloaded ones. Well Sony says it is ok so I am very happy and will download lots more for that feature.

Most games allow us to copy the saved game to a USB stick and move it from one system to the other. There are a couple like Locorocho and High Volocity Bowling that don't allow this. I am not totally sure why but it is ok because they aren't games where it is really hard to work your way back up.

One of my absolute favorite features of the Playstation 3 (normally we just call it the PS3 by the way) is the ability to play back video. You can either copy the video to the PS3's internal hard drive or you can put it on a PC and serve it up over the network. I like to serve the video from the network. First it doesn't eat up my hard drive space and second it make it possible to have one copy of each movie and play it on both players at the same time if I want. So far we like to watch two different movies on two different players. But I can also serve up to other players even Windows Media Player 11 (ick!) if I wanted to.

I have ripped my entire DVD collection to hard drive and that takes up about 200 gig right now. It would never fit on the PS3. Well, not unless you replaced the hard drive (which you can) with something bigger. I know people putting 250 gig drives in theirs for only $120 right now! That is a really good deal. But so far I haven't come even close to using up my drive space because I put the movies on the server.

I actually own all of the DVDs that I have ripped. They are sitting in the cabinet still but will probalby go in a box just like my CD collection did once I ripped all of them. The video quality is just as good as the original DVD and it is wonderful to be able to select the movie from the menu any time I want.

We are using TVersity as our media server. To rip the movies from the DVD, I like to use Magic DVD Ripper to get a fast rip in MPEG-2 format. I could leave the videos in MPEG-2 and get perfect DVD quality, but to save drive space and reduce network traffic I recode them into MPEG-4 using PS3 Video and then put them in the server's video folders.

If you are interested in what video conversion settings I use, I have created a simple PDF that shows my settings and conversion process. You are welcome to check it out and hopefully it is helpful to you. Just click here to view the PDF.

Well, enough chatter about our two Playstation 3 units. It is time to go off and do some gaming or movie watching. No, I really don't play music through the PS3. It does a fine job but I have an MP3 Juke box program that I wrote myself that does a much better job of playing music the way I want.

See Ya!

Visit our other sites:   UPCData.Info  |  BestLittleHairHouse.Info  |  ArtFromTheTribe.com  |  StFrancisRealty.com