Sony PlayTV review

Posted by Al Warmington on Fri 19 Sep 2008

Introduce your PS3 to some legal video content

Your PlayStation 3 viewing is about to change. Gone are the days when your PS3 sat idle as you gawped at an endless succession of soap stars and football players. Now it wants control of your every moment of telly watching. Sony's new PlayTV accessory transforms your PS3 into a complete Freeview box and then harnesses the power of your PS3 hard drive to sling HDD recording into the bargain.

The PlayTV software is a real gem. Everything is neatly laid on a rotating menu, letting you drop straight into live TV, check the schedule for upcoming programmes or you look at a neatly laid out library of your recorded content. The best touch is the Find and Record, which lets you type in keywords to search for any programme airing over the next seven days and set it to record.

Hitting the Select button at any time or when any programme is highlighted on the Guide will set it to record, and it'll do this even if you're watching a Blu-ray disc or playing the game, and will switch the PS3 on from standby if you're out. Dual-tuners also let you record one channel while another is loading, and you can pause, rewind and fast forward live telly, just like you would with a Sky+ box.

Despite having unfinished review code to test, the software was flawless. On the hardware side we'd have preferred there to be a loop-through for the aerial cable for times when you just want to flick on the telly and not wait for the PS3 and PlayTV software to load up. A splitter is a quick way to solve that though.

If you have a PSP, you're in for an extra treat. Remote Play lets you do damn near everything that you can from the main console. The live TV streaming is crisp and impressively smooth. Viewing recorded content was occasionally less stable and, when used locally, seemed to lack a little of the range of the Live content, but was still easily viewable.

Because WiFi coverage is still limited to occasional hotspots, we'd have loved to have the ability to directly copy content onto our PSPs for viewing on the go. Unfortunately, copyright whingers have made that impossible so there's no function to export your recordings to your PSP. However, content can be exported to the PS3's XMB.

Although the MPEG 2 codec is not supported by the PSP itself (not to mention impractically massive), it does mean you can pull video files onto a USB storage device and transcode it using any number of freely available programs found on the net. It's an extra step, but at least it has ruled copying out entirely.