PS3 video store
So I finally took advantage of the Playstation's Video store area and rented the HD version of "Sherlock Holmes" for a fiver. Just like it's compatriot the Game store you can't discover how large the file you want to download is until you pop it into the shopping basket turned out it was 5886MB. I started the download on a Saturday at around 8am 7 hours later it finally finished.
Yeah a speed of about 1.8Mbits/sec, to have watched it streaming live I'd need an 8Mbit/sec and as my line tops out at 7 that ain't going to happen. As mentioned I'm not sure if this is a problem at the Sony end or if Orange are throttling the line; the speed did seem pretty consistent throughout though.
So the film itself now sat on my hard drive. As I was told before quite clearly this was now available for me to watch within a 14 day window; once I started watching though that closed to a 48 hour window. In the small print, again available before you purchase, which you had to find for yourself there's some exemptions. You can't transfer an HD video from one PS3 to another even if you 'activate' the second PS3. This makes sense as when I watched it I wasn't hooked up to the internet, so if this wasn't set I could, in theory, transfer it, watch it, then watch it again on the different machine outside the 48 hour limit.
Of course that wouldn't be a problem if this 48 hour thing didn't exist, what's the point of it?
Anyway the film itself came with no special features as you might expect and started straight off without the annoying crud you get at the front of DVDs. So it's fine, it means you're not at the whim of the rental shop selling out of the latest release, of being accused of scratching discs or returning it late, but the download is a problem. It's not a spur-of-the-moment thing, with the best bet being to download things the night before.
Mentioning how it works to my parents the response was that it might be nice to load it up with films over the Xmas period to give them something to watch as a respite over the repeats.
5 comments:
Here's a random thing: My mum's BT Vision box is supposedly capable of playing various films, for a small fee.
As it turns out, the list of available films is pretty tiny. (E.g., they have Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, but none of the other Harry Potter films. Just that one. A small random subset of films are available in HD as well / only.)
Most of them cost £3, except for, oh, all the ones you'd actually want to watch, which are £9 or more. I'm not sure that's competitive against just buying the DVD!
Anyway, I selected X-Men III, confirmed my selection, and X-Men III immediately started playing. I'm not sure how that's physically possible, given that my Internet connection is a piffling 8 Mbit/sec, which is vastly less than the bitrate required to get a sharp picture with most codecs. Certainly the picture did look very sharp, and there were no pauses at any point, so...
(Hell, if the Vision modem actually had activity lights, I could maybe tell you how hard it was or wasn't working to download the data...)
Presumably if anybody else in the building was using the Internet, the film would have stopped playing. Oh, but that's right, technically you're not supposed to use more than one PC, according to the T&C. Yeah, right…
The selection on the Sony Store is 700+ on the rental side IIRC can't recall though if that's just the HD rentals or a mixture.
Sounds like the prices are better with Sony too.
In theory I could have started the movie playing while it was downloading and possibly that would have kicked the speed up, but due to the time restraints I was reluctant to experiment. I might try it with a smaller cheaper SD-only film rental next time.
I'm unsure as to which codecs are being used by Sony, but like your experience the picture was sharp and the PS3 reported a throughput rate I'd expect from a HD Blu-ray picture.
The Vision modem doesn't have activity lights? Hmm I suppose, is it meant to be put in the living room where flashes would be considered distracting?
Actually it has several lights on it, all of which flash at random in a way which doesn't appear to be related to network activity. It's plausible that one or other of these is an activity light, but good luck figuring out which one. (Or why they flash when there are no computers switched on in the building…)
My Livebox has four lights, wireless, connection, phone, data activity; all work in a consistent manner. As to why they might flash by themselves - the ISP sometimes requests a "are you still there?" ping.
There shouldn't be any need to ping the modem; you can tell by the presence of absence of a carrier signal whether the router is still running.
I suppose it might conceivable be trying to determine whether the Vision box is still running.
Also, that reminds me… I still need to find a way to permanently disable the wireless functionality.
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