Tag Archives: HD Audio

PS3 Wishlist

Posted on 30. Apr, 2007 by zerolight in Gadgets & Stuff

I’ve had the PS3 a little while now and find that there’s a few simple things that I hope Sony will integrate into the OS. Sure, it could have a better online service, and better integration of your friends list into games, and better use of voice chat, and all the other things we’ve come to love about the 360. But none of those are as important to me as the following.

1. Independent resolutions for the Dashboard, Gaming, and Blu-Ray playback. I’d like to be able to set my Dashboard and Gaming to 720p, and Blu-Ray movie playback to 1080i. Developers can already force games to 720p regardless of dashboard resolution, so why not just expand the options and make them available to the user. This would be great because…

  • The dashboard is far better (at least on 1360×768 / 720p TVs) at 720p – it makes using the web-browser (particularly with per pixel view enabled) a lovely couch potato experience.
  • Games run better at 720p. Forget all the hype Sony would have you believe about true HD being 1080p – MS were right all along, this generation, 720p is the sweet spot for gaming, above that and current hardware can’t cope so framerates drop, graphical effects pale, and so on.
  • Right now, the only way you can actually watch a Blu-Ray movie in HD is to set your PS3 to output at 1080i or 1080p as the PS3 can’t actually display them at 720p. A hassle if your gaming and browsing preference is 720p. Soon you will be able to watch Blu-Ray at 720p, but even then I’ll still want to watch them at 1080i because there’s less scaling involved than at 720p. ie. 1900×1080 -> 1360×768 as opposed to 1900×1080 -> 1280×720 -> 1360×768. Add in a bit of overscan and that 2nd option has a lot of scaling. More scaling = poorer picture.

    • 2. What’s the point of setting up the audio formats your AV amp supports only to have Blu Ray movies default to plain old DD 5.1 (640kps bitrate)? Should I really have to go into the options menu of my Casino Royale disc in order to enable uncompressed 5.1 surround (4.6Mbps bitrate)? How about making the PS3 a bit more intelligent – isn’t that Cell processor meant to be a super computer ? Let me choose my preferred audio and video options, then actually use them.

    3. Let me stream movies from my Mac. In any format. And while your at it Mr Sony, let me also stream MP3s and Photos.

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    HDMI for HD Audio

    Posted on 29. Mar, 2007 by zerolight in Gadgets & Stuff

    I never really understood what HDMI was all about, assuming that it was simply a digital video standard. I think most people are of that opinion. But some research today into why my PS3 is kicking out Multi Channel Linear PCM instead of Dolby Digital or DTS has led me to realise that HDMI is all about high bandwidth audio.

    HD players such as the PS3 can decode the new HD audio CODECs (used on Blu Ray and HD DVD) and send them to an AV amp via HDMI as MPCM (Multi Channel Linear PCM data). Thus, if your amp can accept MPCM over HDMI then it doesn’t need to be able to decode the new HD Audio CODECs such as TrueHD or DTS HD. Instead these are decoded by the source (eg. PS3) and sent to the amp via HDMI. Which explains why my Denon AV3806 displays “MULTI CH IN” when I connect the PS3.

    This link explains it way better than I could ever do.

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