PlayTV dated, will record TV while gaming News

Shame freeview is pants :)

(smug Sky owner)

Sounds good.

Wonder what the Xbots will say? "OMG NO GAMES LOLOLOLOLOLOL"

Yay, sounds ace.

@ Turnip_of_Doom

The cool thing is transferring to PSP, but yeah the rest you already have if you have Sky+.

No way paying for SKY, what next, paying for ONLINE GAMING?!

And being able to configure it remotely using your PSP. That for me is the clincher. I can set my TV to record stuff from anywhere I can get a wifi connection.

That's excellent news. Will sway me to buying a PS3 perhaps as soon as the end of the year.

No setting it to record a series is a major downer though, thats 90% of my recording via wmce.

GIVE.
NOW.

Finally! A date!

Really pleased that this is all sorted. I've got my TV installed and I'm ready to throw my Virgin Media box out of my window, rock band stylee.

@ tonynibbles

Hold up your gonna blow out cable for freeview????

It's a cool gadget sure but freeview over cable/sat no way!

Why the hell didnt they announce this in the Sony show... it would have made it much more interesting.

99 Euroes.. doesnt sound bad, I mean i was seriously considering replacing my sky box for Sky+ but sky are still charging way too much for it. Im sure i could pick up a cheaper "dvd/HD" combo but i have two much tv cabinet equipment already and didnt want to do that, so using the PS3 is a much better solution :D

I blew out SKY for freeview - overpriced piece of crap service imo.

/got fucked off with losing SKY when it was windy or rainy... a fairly common problem with SKY and possibly not the best problem to have in a windy, rainy country.

I've got Virgin+ and I'm STILL getting this.

The reason? It also supports DLNA (Look it up yourself)

Excellent! Finally, some good news. Really looking forward to this. At last I'll be able record those films from Film4.

Widge, that actually made me laugh.

No comment on record while gaming confirmation, then. Where are the tossers that were bitching and moaning about the feature?

nnnnggg

My Birthday!?

Damn you, now I know what I'm going to have to try and get as a present.

@ Rash'

Did you really expect them to turn up and say "Well done, Sony! I'm glad my fears weren't realised."

I expect they will be in presently to pour scorn over some detail or other...

They should have confirmed this during the presentation instead of being obsessed with proving everybody that they care about games.

Well, it IS a bit costly.. :P

I wonder if you would work on an external hard drive. I would like to keep the TV side of things separate to the games.

Hahaha Sky HD or PlayTV...hmmm

I wonder if you would work on an external hard drive. I would like to keep the TV side of things separate to the games.

They showed how it works already, and the recorded shows are exported directly to the XMB. From there, you can easily copy them to any external HDD.

how much is this in £? I see 99 Euros but is that around 80 quid?

How much are decent twin-tuner Freeview PVRs these days, anyway>

Monkey. That's High Def tuners btw. They support the HD signal. Not like those £10 boxes you get in tesco.

Hahaha Sky HD or PlayTV...hmmm

yes dom6918?

Freeview is FREE unlike the rip-off that is Sky. Personally, I believe there is more than enough to watch via Freeview, I already spend enough time watching tv and I really don't want an extra 300 channels of advert filled crap from Sky. Advert filled crap that is a rip-off too!

And if there doesn't happen to be anything on Freeview you want to watch, well, you could, you know, PLAY A GAME? ;)

how much is this in £? I see 99 Euros but is that around 80 quid?

Close. 100€ is roughly 75£.

What's all this about Oz and NZ not having agreed a TV standard? It's the same digital tv standard as the UK.
(Unless it's some sort of net based scheduler, which would be good as the terrestrial TV networks here customarily either black out the transmitted schedule data, or put the wrong finish times to bork recorded shows).

Or maybe it just doesn't work upside down. :/

Great step forward that it works while playing.

If/when they introduce a series link type function then I am sold for sure.

I don't have sky (and with a decent pvr there really is no need to waste your money on thousands of channels of repeats), so this is a good alternative. To beat WMCE it needs to repeat record shows rather than times and channels, though.

If it is going to be used just as a freeview tuner (i.e. for simply just watching the telly), does the PS3 need to be switched on as well? Anyone know?
This is a deal or no deal issue for me.

Hmm ... any news on whether it will now be compatible with Freeview's upcoming HD channels? If so it's a definite purchase - and a lot cheaper than getting a new PVR.

I mean i was seriously considering replacing my sky box for Sky+ but sky are still charging way too much for it.

Phone up their cancellations department and say you're cancelling. When they ask why (and they will), say it's because upgrading to Sky+ is too expensive. They WILL offer you a cheap upgrade (mine cost 60 quid), but you HAVE to phone the cancellations department not the customer service department. You will never, ever look back once you've got Sky+, it's seriously the best thing to happen in consumer electronics since the invention of the iPod.

I'll probably be getting a PlayTV too, though, because the idea of turning my PSP into a top-quality portable telly is just too good.

@Rev. Stuart Campbell
"Phone up their cancellations department and say you're cancelling. When they ask why (and they will), say it's because upgrading to Sky+ is too expensive. They WILL offer you a cheap upgrade (mine cost 60 quid), but you HAVE to phone the cancellations department not the customer service department."

This works for Virgin Media as well btw. Their 3 for £30 pounds deal is only 12 months, but if you phone up after a year and say you're thinking of quiting they'll give you another year.

Nice. Not something I'll be getting since I have a 160GB Freeview PVR already, but if I didn't, this would probably be a feature I'd take advantage of.

As for Sky... unless you're really into Sky Sports, I can't see the point in paying any more than the licence fee for television.

@Killdare: Freeview HD is still only at planning/proposal stage with an estimated start date of 2009/2010. It will use a different standard DVB-T2 (as opposed to the current DVB-T) hence current set top boxes and TVs won't be able to receive it.

Good news that you can record while playing - it would have been a bit useless without this feature.

As for series links, the info is already broadcast on Freeview (my Humax 9200 happily does series link recording) so you'd think that if this isn't in the first release there's nothing stopping them adding it later. It is a killer feature.

By the way, the reason they haven't mentioned any of this in their E3 conference is because it was aimed at the US audience and Play TV is Europe only.

Can I ask a silly question?

If games are installed on the hard-drive like MGS4, wont the fact that shows being recorded on the hard-drive and games being played slow down the processor as it will be doing two things at the same thing. Just because my computer struggles do things like this and slows down tremendously.

I hope this works with Freesat

@johnnybrn

It is a risk I guess, but neither application is grinding the drive. They are both cacheing or reading intermittently, so I suppose if they weren't trying to both do their thing at the same time everything would be ok. On the flip side, if they were both hitting the disc at the same time I would expect badness to result.

No doubt someone technical has a clearer view of things (maybe even with a diagram).

@ johnnybrn

The PS3 with it's cell chip can handle multi threaded media activities very well - far better than your average PC. Arguably it's better at this sort of activity than it is at rendering games.

Also multiple threads accessing the hard drive should not be a problem either. For example on my Humax 9200 I can record 2 programmes while watching a third. If my Hummy can manage this then I'm sure the PS3 can handle it in it's sleep ;-)

@ Stuz359

I don't know if you're just being facetious or not but no, it will not work with Freesat as this is completely different tech to Freeview.

"If games are installed on the hard-drive like MGS4, wont the fact that shows being recorded on the hard-drive and games being played slow down the processor as it will be doing two things at the same thing. Just because my computer struggles do things like this and slows down tremendously. "
I don't know, but maybe you should get a new computer :)

Your average freeview channel is roughly 2mb/s of data. That's not even enough to be noticed by most decent modern hard disks. OK, it could slow the loading times down a little but it certainly shouldn't affect gameplay. In fact, they could cheat, and just spool what's coming in through the USB port to the disk and do any processing required later when you actually watch it, so the processor hit of recording would be minimal. Especially given the PS3 is pretty much designed with doing more than one thing at a time in mind.

I know the parallel isn't exact, but a SkyHD box (which is much much less powerful than a PS3) can handle recording two HD streams (which are roughly 10 times a freeview stream) to the disk at the same time while playing a third stream back from the disk to the screen. Bandwidth to the disk isn't an issue and if they do it right it shouldn't affect gameplay in any way you'd notice. You might hear the fan kick up a bit more but other than that...

Jon

Thanks :)

Methinks I'll be getting a PS3 then

When either the KZ2 or RFOM2 bundle with DS3 comes out later in the year (hopefully there will also be a price drop)

I wonder if this is going to work with freeview HD in the UK... I believe thats to start surfacing in 2009 onwards.

Sounds good. Might be nice as a spare recorder; especially the PSP transfer.

Prefer SkyHD but you can't copy that to your PSP (and I don't want to pay for the SKY/PSP addon).

You can sset recordnig via a PC or mobile phone on Sky+. As a Sky subscriber you can also watch Sky content on any PC, so the PSP functionality isn't that radical. And for someone who couldn't give a toss for sport, but likes movies, there is another reason to have Sky+.

Anyhow, I have the Sky HD service and it's great, but it's still too expensive. Sky have reduced the price of the HD box, but it's the subscription costs they need to seriously trim. Up until now though, where's the competetion? Virgin? But this sort of service will help. And it'll give you BBC, Channel4 and ITV HD I think?

If I didn't have a Sky PLus i wouldprobably get this. Handy way to get a freeview PVR if you own a PS3.

I think storage will be an issue on the curent PS3's though so an HDD upgrade would be needd ( i may need to do this anyway).

@ peterfll

Channel4 HD is only available on Sky at the mo. ITV HD is only watchable on Freesat (it's a bit shit at the mo though as it's only the odd program and you access it by pressing the red button on the normal ITV1 channel). BBC HD is available on Freesat, Virgin and Sky HD.

Freeview are supposed to launch a HD service next year but I wouldn't hold my breath. Also I'm not 100% convinced that Play TV will be compatible with this as I think the standard is yet to be set.

Yeah, that's one of the biggest issues with using the PS3 as an HD PVR. HD gobbles up space like no tomorrow. The SKy HD box with it's 160gb doesn't go very far.