PS3 Video Playback -- Open & Unrestricted

November 11th, 2006, 08:09 Posted By: wraggster

Via IGN

For those frustrated with the Xbox 360's limited video playback features (and for those of you angry at PS3 for not upscaling DVDs), here's something to smile about: video playback on Sony's new system seems to have no restrictions of any kind. Barring a lack of support for your chosen format (which of course will never make anybody happy since there are 5 zillion media formats out there and no media player can play back everything), the PS3 will play back videos without issue, even at full HD quality.

This is good news after the PlayStation Portable unfortunately delivered less-than-ideal video playback maxing out in consumer releases at 320x240 anamorphic instead of full 480x272 (although this PSP fault is likely due to support of outdated Memory Stick Video Format restrictions, some blame this on Sony's fear that UMD would not sell if users were allowed to make full-resolution video ... indeed, Sony's own Japanese P.TV site offers encrypted videos at full-res, but consumer compression applications can only make small-resolution PSP videos.) Here with PS3, we were able to play videos at 720p and even 1080p off of a Memory Stick after first compressing them to the AVC format. (Our tests used Sorensen Squeeze, but any AVC compressor should be able to do the job.)

We also tested PSP-sized AVC and MP4 files, which played back just fine. Some of these videos were odd-sized videos, and they also played back without issue. We have not yet been able to put the system through a stress-test to see if the PS3 is able to play videos that do not conform to standard broadcast or PSP-supported q-pel formats, but we will be testing this soon -- so far, this seems to not be an issue.

In addition to AVC, PS3 will also be able to play MPEG1, MPEG2, and standard-profile MP4 videos, all common formats and all formats easily found in consumer-level (and freeware/shareware) video compression applications. We were able to test MPEG2 and MP4-SP, and both formats worked just as any other video format on PS3, without issue. You cannot, however, reformat videos -- you can copy them from device to device, but unlike with music files, you can't re-encode them under a more preferred or tighter codec. We also loaded an AVI file into the PS3, and while it recognized that a file was loaded, it showed the AVI file as Corrupted Data, just as on PSP.

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