SCE engineers talk about FW 2.20 and the future


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Saw this posted at PS3forums.com:

Ok, come across this great piece of info. Thx again to the E-mpire forums & B3D for sharing it with us...

Really promising stuff there!!! Hope they can realize all the ideas listed below with upcoming firmware releases.

Originally posted on the japanese site "AV Watch", then translated by a member of the B3D forums:

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20080403/rt057.htm

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p...651#post1145651

  • Apparently movie studios are satisfied with BD-Live functions in PS3. Its processing speed / graphics rendering is much faster than dedicated players and the performance gap won't get narrower soon. Even among current BD-Java titles, some are doing performance profiling in a loading screen and show richer effects on PS3. Such differentiation by player performance may happen for BD-Live too. It is not something special only for PS3, it's in the spec of the BD format.
  • 2.20 has neither Managed Copy (w/ transcoding) nor Portable Copy (w/o transcoding, demoed at CES) implemented.
  • In-game XMB is one of the features discussed at SCE, but they can't comment on the date and so on yet. Though some of the XMB functions are already available in-game by an update, not many games support them yet.
  • To licensee developers, it was announced that 2.20 could reduce system memory resource usage a lot.
  • The web browser runs faster and has better streaming support than before. Though they can't comment on which particular service they'll support at this point, it will be improved further.
  • Though it's technically possible that PS3 charges fees for certain updates, they continue free updates as the basic concept of PS3 is a hardware that evolves with updates.
  • Optical discs and media files (including DLNA) are played back through 2 different paths in PS3. Functions such as noise reduction are first implemented in the optical disc player, then some of them are applied to the media player.
    While an optical disc player only requires an implementation in the range of an official spec, a media player needs a different know-how or sometimes a new algorithm to support files authored by general users with varied encoding settings.
    The playback quality of AVCHD is currently higher when you open it from a disc or a memory stick than from a file in a folder.
  • The main target of mosquito noise reduction is recordings from digital TV. It assumes a use case where a user plays a long MPEG-4 AVC file recorded on a BD. The upconversion in 1.80 was useless for a noisy movie, so noise reduction (not only the specific function of mosquito noise reduction, but also other filters) has been improved in 2.20.
  • Though mosquito noise reduction is high on the processing load, the total load is lower than that of the first version of the PS3 BD player or 1.80. In 1.80, it was almost full load when upconverting a DVD, but not now due to optimization.
    Currently it doesn't reach full load unless it plays back 2 AVC streams in Picture-in-Picture while running high-load BD-Java.
  • As for 1080 deinterlacing and DTS-HD MA, "please look forward to them."
  • The LTH support took time since they had to test it with a LTH disc recorded with a Sony BD recorder.
  • The update schedule is not different from before, basically a large update is once in a quarter. However the next update will be released soon because of the new PS Store.
  • It's recommended to update a PS3 since BD titles with new encryption keys start to appear. Though 1.80 already has the latest key, image quality in the latest firmware is a lot better.
    An updater for PS3 is also contained in some movie titles. The Blu-ray version of Resident Evil 3 has a 2.10 updater.

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Source: http://www.ps3forums.com/showthread.php?t=131990

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Damn. Sounds like 2.2 is more of a blu-ray update and optimization than adding in-game XMB or Home beta.

Well considering 2.20 has been out for a bit now, any of us could of told you that. :p

it was said before we could downland 2.20 that it was mainly for the Blu-Ray 2.0 profile stuff.

Optimization is always good though, look at Criterion and Burnout Paradise, they can now add 1080i support because of less memory used for the OS, which should be in the games free update. :D

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Well considering 2.20 has been out for a bit now, any of us could of told you that. :p

it was said before we could downland 2.20 that it was mainly for the Blu-Ray 2.0 profile stuff.

Optimization is always good though, look at Criterion and Burnout Paradise, they can now add 1080i support because of less memory used for the OS, which should be in the games free update. :D

Derp.

I guess for some reason 2.2 was the next update on the way. oops. :blush:

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jeepers, DTS-HD MA support :blink:

without hardware decoding, that sure would eat up a lot of processor cycles

unless you believe the people that say that currently less than 20% of Cell's true power is being harnessed :p

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jeepers, DTS-HD MA support :blink:

without hardware decoding, that sure would eat up a lot of processor cycles

unless you believe the people that say that currently less than 20% of Cell's true power is being harnessed :p

Now confirmed for next week :D

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Bhav informed me of this link confirming DTS HD-MA support :-D

http://blog.us.playstation.com/2008/04/10/...re-walkthrough/

ahh i'm impressed :-D

one final question though... to actually GET the HD-MA signal, i'm presuming you can't run it through optical, but through HDMI only - but what version HDMI does the PS3 have, and will it support that? I've read around before that the older versions of HDMI don't support some codecs :blink:

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thanks for that nic... there you go (Y)

but then again, back to my original concern... since there's no native hardware support, how much CPU usage will this take up? i'm guessing a fair bit... does that matter at all? i know it might seem like a silly question, but i'm trying to be serious here. are there any possible drawbacks to that?

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thanks for that nic... there you go (Y)

but then again, back to my original concern... since there's no native hardware support, how much CPU usage will this take up? i'm guessing a fair bit... does that matter at all? i know it might seem like a silly question, but i'm trying to be serious here. are there any possible drawbacks to that?

I wouldn't say any drawbacks.

I mean, when you're watching a film on the PS3, you aren't exactly going to be playing a game at the same time! Using in-game XMB on top of a film shouldn't be an issue either.

The only thing, that may be an issue if what you say about CPU usage is true, is if you're watching a movie whilst recording something off TV with PlayTV (it has background recording).

However the devs of PlayTV said they plan on having it recording in the background whilst you are playing games, and in my books, there isn't going to be anything more CPU intensive on the PS3 than playing a game!

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