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 Digg.com Facebook Google Bookmarks N4G Gamerblips del.icio.us Reddit Slashdot.org StumbleUpon Is it worth buying? I could do with recording some free Friends episodes... Well at least Spain has something, as the ISP's here are rubbish.
I am getting my hands on this very soon.
Sweet I'll be honest with you chaps, I've got it and I don't use it as much as I thought I would. The fact you have to leave your PS3 on whilst it records can be a pain if your going out or wanting to record things late at night.
The quality regularly dips and a lot of channels alter there reception, I know it depends on area but you'd see what I mean if you had it.
Quite steep for £50 but a steal if it's on sale. I have a different opinion to the above. My wife and I bought PlayTV when it came out thinking it would be a nice occasional use product and we ended up using it every single day to the point where we couldn't now live without it.
Christmas was great with a schedule full of stuff ready to record. It's easy to move recordings to XMB and then onto external hard drive (as we do) meaning that we've already got close to 100 movies on file.
The pause function is really impressive compared to something we had before which always stalled when pausing.
I also think that they've updated the "must have PS3 on at all times" flaw. Now, providing it's on standby, the PS3 switches itself on to record stuff in the schedule, then switches itself off again.
Personally I would highly recommend this and it's great to see that there's an upscale update. I actually thought they were upscaling already because the quality is better than the built-in Freeview in our HD telly. You guys do realise you've NEVER had to leave your ps3 on right? It was incorrectly reported that you did before release, leaving it in standby with a scheduled recording switches itself on when necessary then off again when complete. It has always done this It's as good as any digital recorder out there but if you only have a 40gb hard drive you will have to upgrade it. I installed a 320gb in my PS3, it's plenty of room. That SD upscaler is an excellent edition.
Like the guy above says, you don't need to leave you PS3 on all the time. It will record from standby. If you have a PSP you can remote link to your PS3 and watch what ever programs you have recorded as well. what about free sat. isn't that free hd tv over here. Intheory the bbc at leaset aren't allowed to charge you anything for broadcast programmes eitther.
well an upscaller is definatly a good update for it. surprising how much difference upscaling makes to standard def. Just wondering if anyone knows when this update is live? Cos ive just booted up my playtv and theres no update avalible That's the problem with Fresat, everyone thinks it's all HD channels, it's not. And even the HD channels are not always HD.
If I didn't already have Sky HD, I would certainly be interested in Play TV. Being given this by a friend this weekend, she hasnt got a PS3 and works for a marketing agency, nice !! Freesat requires a dish and this uses a standard ariel. Good point - I meant to add that I upgraded my internal HDD to 320gb and use every drop of that as a result of PlayTV (and to a lesser extent loads of PSN stuff, photos and music). Only cost me £50 so it was worth it.
Additionally I've got a 500gb external drive so I move things across if I want to keep them. It's also handy for backing up the main drive from time to time. What's the point of adding SD upscaling when every HDTV does that anyway. If it didn't then all your SDTV programs would only take up a fraction of the screen. That's the aspect ratio of the TV and it's because all HDTV's are widescreen. A widescreen SDTV does the same. It's not upscaling. Upscaling improves the image quality and not the image size. No it has little to do with aspect ratio and everything to do with the physical number of pixels on the screen. If a 720p television is displaying 480i content at full screen, then it is being upscaled, end of story.
It might not be very good at resizing the image, but if some form of upscaling wasn't being employed somewhere along the chain then the SD video simply would not fill the screen.
It seems to me that this new PlayTV upscaler is either now doing the upconversion on the PS3 side where it wasn't before, or they've simply improved/replaced the upscaling they were doing before.
Doesn't the PS3 do hardware scaling anyway? If not, WHY not?!?
Nonsense. Converting an image from 640x480 to 1600x1200 - that's upscaling. The term is interchangable with resizing, upconversion, etc. Changing the SIZE (ie pixel dimensions) of the image is EXACTLY what it does. I thought it already did all that? Plus let you record two channels and play a game at the same time? :? I'm moving house as I have had no internet for 7 months... I almost died, lol, anyway I'll have some decent broadband when I move to my new apartment, my query is... is it actually going to be decent quality if my TV has built-in freeview and where I currently live hasn't switched to Digital, my friend has a Sky, and he has the Play system, and he says that when he uses it, it interferes with the signal, and the image quality decreases, and if I only have freeview, I don't want to fork out £50 quid for it if it lowers the quality in the end. Also do you need broadband at all to use it?
P.S. Sorry for the back story at the start, its a bad habit. I use PlayTV because it's a cheap alternative to a PVR, and also pretty small.
A decent normal digibox sets you back £25, so £45 for unlimited amounts of recording space is pretty good. Add onto this the possibility of getting HDfreeview reception in the future, which you can guarantee most manufacturers are going to charge a lot of money for.
A thing about the HD reception in the future though, I don't see how it will do this without a DVB-T2 tuner. There weren't even any specifications for it when PlayTV was released. Unless this is something that could be achieved with a firmware update. »No it has little to do with aspect ratio and everything to do with the physical number of pixels on the screen. If a 720p television is displaying 480i content at full screen, then it is being upscaled, end of story.
It might not be very good at resizing the image, but if some form of upscaling wasn't being employed somewhere along the chain then the SD video simply would not fill the screen.
It seems to me that this new PlayTV upscaler is either now doing the upconversion on the PS3 side where it wasn't before, or they've simply improved/replaced the upscaling they were doing before.
Doesn't the PS3 do hardware scaling anyway? If not, WHY not?!?
Toshiba have only just released an upscaling HDTV. All other HDTV's don't take a SD picture and upscale it to 720p. The best you will get is 576i which is still standard definition. You're confusing image size and image quality. When will the update be available?? I looked tonight and its not there :( Jim steele sorry mate but you got it all wrong. upscalling a image has nothing to do with pic size its the image quality that it will be improving.
does any1 no when its out? i use playtv myself, i no longer use a digi box cuz playtv pic quality is better | 
