So the new PS3 firmware dropped yesterday here in the USA, and WOW are there a lot of new features. I had a handful of little pet peeves about the way the PS3 worked, and it feels like out of nowhere they fixed them all.
The biggest news is probably the upgrade to Flash Player 9 -- hello YouTube and Hulu! Though, I'm having problems with Hulu. Some videos stutter (and they keep stuttering even if I pause playback and give it extra time to buffer, which makes me think it's the player's fault, not my net connection).
They also included auto-off for both controllers and the console, one of the few things I liked better about my 360 than my PS3.
There's an option under Video Settings now that lets you set it up so videos will play the way audio always has -- that is, when one video finishes, go to the next "track" (item in the folder). This is *awesome*, because sometimes I want to put on short TV clips for my kid, and I don't want to have to pick up the controller every 7 minutes to start the next one. This might be related to the only net negative I noticed -- now, hitting the PS button while watching a video pauses the video when the menu comes up. A mild annoyance, if that.
The last update I noticed is a new "scene search" for videos. This is also very clever. Just hit Square while watching a video, and it will pause. A bar shows at the bottom of the screen with snapshots spaced every minute. Right and left navigate to the frame shown in the snapshot, while up and down change the spacing -- something like 5 minutes, 1 minute, 30 seconds, 10 seconds, etc. It certainly makes commercial skipping easier.
There's so much content there, I'm surprised they didn't consider it a full version-number upgrade. Has anybody else noticed changes in this version I didn't catch?
The biggest news is probably the upgrade to Flash Player 9 -- hello YouTube and Hulu! Though, I'm having problems with Hulu. Some videos stutter (and they keep stuttering even if I pause playback and give it extra time to buffer, which makes me think it's the player's fault, not my net connection).
They also included auto-off for both controllers and the console, one of the few things I liked better about my 360 than my PS3.
There's an option under Video Settings now that lets you set it up so videos will play the way audio always has -- that is, when one video finishes, go to the next "track" (item in the folder). This is *awesome*, because sometimes I want to put on short TV clips for my kid, and I don't want to have to pick up the controller every 7 minutes to start the next one. This might be related to the only net negative I noticed -- now, hitting the PS button while watching a video pauses the video when the menu comes up. A mild annoyance, if that.
The last update I noticed is a new "scene search" for videos. This is also very clever. Just hit Square while watching a video, and it will pause. A bar shows at the bottom of the screen with snapshots spaced every minute. Right and left navigate to the frame shown in the snapshot, while up and down change the spacing -- something like 5 minutes, 1 minute, 30 seconds, 10 seconds, etc. It certainly makes commercial skipping easier.
There's so much content there, I'm surprised they didn't consider it a full version-number upgrade. Has anybody else noticed changes in this version I didn't catch?
