Sony's PS3 DVR PlayTV launch date and price confirmed

Piece by piece, Sony’s PS3 has the potential to be one of the best, if not the best, media centers on the market.

Ability to stream content from a Windows PC (or Mac) to a television? Check.

DivX support? Check.

Blu-ray player? Check.

USB device support? Check.

Portable integration? Check (via the PSP).

DVR functionality? Announced.

Movie download store? Coming soon.

It’s just that most consumers don’t know it.

Perhaps that will change this September, in Europe at least, when the PS3’s DVR add-on finally goes on sale. Priced at 100 Euros (£80/$160), the PlayTV features twin tuners for DVB-T digital TV, so that users can watch one show while recording another, as well as pause live TV — pretty standard for any modern DVR. Recorded content is stored on the PS3’s internal hard drive, which, at as little as 40GB, could soon fill up. Let’s hope PlayTV will also support external USB drives.

A really nice touch is that recordings can be streamed across the Internet to a synced up PSP, giving PlayTV some SlingBox-like functionality.

All good so far.

There remains, however, one potential deal breaker: It’s not clear if PlayTV can record shows while the PS3 is being used to play games. If that’s the case, then the PS3 could remain confined to being just another games console after all.

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last100 is edited by Steve O'Hear. Aside from founding last100, Steve is co-founder and CEO of Beepl and a freelance journalist who has written for numerous publications, including TechCrunch, The Guardian, ZDNet, ReadWriteWeb and Macworld, and also wrote and directed the Silicon Valley documentary, In Search of the Valley. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

4 Responses to “Sony's PS3 DVR PlayTV launch date and price confirmed”

  1. **There remains, however, one potential deal breaker: It’s not clear if PlayTV can record shows while the PS3 is being used to play games. If that’s the case, then the PS3 could remain confined to being just another games console after all.**

    If Sony can’t get in-game-dashboard support to work, how the heck are they going to get a DVR working in the background?!

  2. Olivier says:

    Browser with flash ? Check
    DVD Upscaler ? Check

  3. Olivier says:

    The following types of video files can be played:

    * Memory Stick Video Format
    * – MPEG-4 SP (AAC LC)
    * – H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Main Profile (AAC LC)
    * MP4 file format
    * – H.264/MPEG-4 AVC High Profile (AAC LC)
    * MPEG-1 (MPEG Audio Layer 2)
    * MPEG-2 PS (MPEG2 Audio Layer 2, AAC LC, AC3(Dolby Digital), LPCM)
    * MPEG-2 TS (MPEG2 Audio Layer 2)
    * AVI
    * – Motion JPEG (Linear PCM)
    * – Motion JPEG (μ-Law)
    * AVCHD (.m2ts / .mts)
    * DivX
    * WMV
    * – VC-1(WMA Standard V2)

  4. ps3 says:

    has anyone found out if the prog will record while im playing a game on my ps3

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