Gadgetory

so it's been seven very close round and the square is once again tied up in the later round we'll be comparing the gaming performance but before we get to that in this round we'll be taking an in-depth look at the media playback features so once again hold on to your hats and get ready for some heavyweight game console action it's LP from TechnoBuffalo and welcome to the next installment of the console in this round I'm going to try to cover all the essentials relating to the media playback properties from supported video formats to media server streaming and media center features and ok for the past 7 rounds it's really been the pink elephant in the room and there's probably about a thousand comments about this in this series of videos what about blu-ray and let's get to that first as you guys probably know blu-ray and HD DVD duked it out a couple of years ago and the defeat of HD DVD meant for the standardization of a single high definition media the Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on sold initially for a ridiculous 180 bucks but anyways I'm not going to be digging up a dead format for this comparison so you can consider HD DVD gone and forgotten I've seen and read a lot of comments saying who needs blu-ray when upscale DVDs are just as good well this ain't exactly true the truth is if you have a decent 1080p TV set bigger than 32 inches the difference is significant even compared to the best upscale DVDs upscaling is a process that mathematically matches the pixel count of the DVD signal to the physical pixel count of your TV rather than just stretching the pixel aspect ratio the signal is recalculated to suit the native resolution of your TV set which results in a nice and clear signal that adds to the resolution artificially so the amount of pixels in the source content is not magically transformed into HD it's only the signal but I do admit some upscale deviants look great but the majority of DVDs look nothing like HD especially if you're watching on a TV set larger than 40 inches to brush up on the basics of high-definition most of your DVDs are in 480p or 576p to make an example your ntsc dvds usually have a resolution of 720 by 480 pixels the resolution is the same for your old 4 by 3 aspect ratio TV meaning that the pixels are stretched and resized to achieve widescreen now with high-definition 1080p content the resolution is 1920 by 1080 pixels which is the exact same pixel aspect ratio of your full HD TV set now this means that there's no scaling no stretching and every store pixel on the media will be displayed natively at your TV set while standard definition DVDs have 350,000 pixels a blu-ray with a 1080 B signal has over 2 million pixels which is exactly 6 times the amount you find on your standard definition 480p DVD not only the sharpness improved in 6 times the resolution every pixel as the possibility of more colors and shades of grey translating into more color depth the amount of colors on the media cannot even be produced on your average LCD TV but if you've had the opportunity of seeing a blu-ray playing on an old screen you've probably seen his potential thankfully sony was kind enough to send me a 40-inch prototype oled screen for this particular review so I know what I'm talking about ok that was a blatant lie I wish they did though picture quality is one thing but motion processing is another this can get a bit tricky so put on your smart caps most theatrical movie releases have a frame rate of 24 frames per second which is directly incompatible with your standard TV with a refresh rate of 50 or 60 Hertz the frame rate of the video source has to match or has to be equally divided with the refresh rate of your TV so up until recently the native frame rate of film has needed to be converted for video to suit the refresh rates of old TVs to make an example for ntsc dvds 24 frames per second content is converted to 30 frames per second with a process called 3 by 2 pulldown where an individual film frame is converted to 2 & 3 alternating fields a video that runs sequentially and it results in an unnatural jittering in the motion so if you're watching a DVD or blu-ray for that matter off a TV that only supports 50 or 60 Hertz it will have some slight jittering in the motion this is even more noticeable on high-definition content but blu-ray brings an excellent solution to the issue that has plagued video content since the days of Betamax blu-ray as native 24 frames per second support for newer TV sets that are capable of 24 Hertz playback 24 frames per second playback offers the unadulterated constant motion of film but before you run off and buy a TV with a 24 Hertz support I recommend getting a TV that supports a multiple of 24 Hertz because of the different technology 24 Hertz on a TV set can flicker a bit so what you want to do is get the highest multiple of 24 as possible if your wallet can handle it get yourself a TV capable of 120 Hertz playback the signal will be convert in a process called 5x5 Caiden's where every individual film frame has shown five times which results in near-perfect motion so if you still have the smarts to say upscale devious are just as good as blu-ray I'm going to personally come down and whip your ass I'm kidding of course you truly need to be a keen-eyed video file to take notice of these issues but once you do there's no going back blu-ray is also the obvious choice for audio files as well it comes with support for the high definition audio formats although currently the amplifiers capable of these formats are more expensive than the ps3 itself and what benefits does blu-ray bring to gaming as I mentioned in the GPU around the extra space equates less need for compression of textures and other content so a game like Final Fantasy 13 will be on a single blu-ray while on the Xbox 360 it will require four DVDs so no need for swapping discs on ps3 anyways it's quite clear that Sony has the edge on disc media format with jewelry even if the PSP would lose the current console war Sony is still won a war which will echo well beyond the current generation of game consoles much like the install base of ps2 helped the DVD succeed the install base of the ps3 has already established blu-ray as the standard format of high-definition content it's been up to debate what the digital distribution will compete with blu-ray my personal opinion is that while digital distribution will become increasingly popular for renting movies I don't see myself filling up my hard drives with HD content I currently own about 800 DVDs and about 50 blu-rays and I'm not looking to buy ten terabytes of storage to replace my physical disks it's not gonna happen I enjoy having a physical disk I enjoy the cover art and I even joy the box it comes in I guess it's that new plastic smell knows both the ps3 and xbox 360 have movie rating services that work great but because the content is streamed from online the movies are compressed to quite an extent and you can notice some compression issues in high action scenes but I'm guessing the average consumer is willing to pay the same money for the slightly compressed content me I'll probably physically walk a couple of blocks to rent a blu-ray which I can get for the same price as the streamed and compressed high-definition tonight we'll never forget but as I mentioned I have about 800 DVDs and I have no intention of replacing them with blu-ray discs so decent upscaling is a benefit both systems of scalers capable of upscaling to 1080p and I can say the both systems do an excellent job but the ps3 takes the slight edge here as well with better detail and color separation that sets it apart from the DVD upscaling on the Xbox 360 the one media format personally for me that the game consoles have replaced our CDs these days I mostly play my music off my ps3 it's just so easy and fast and here's where the ps3 is simply put excellent it's a miracle-worker when it comes to ripping CDs it can rip even copy protected CDs with amazing speed it only takes a couple of minutes to rip an entire CD and you can even choose the preferred format and bitrate CD ripping is also possible in the Xbox 360 but it pales in comparison against the speed and features of the ps3 from the standpoint of functionality accessing media content on the ps3 is extremely fast and this was one of the reasons why ps3 took around 6 it sometimes just takes too much time to get the content on the Xbox 360 I also have to give the ps3 a small complement for music visualizations which are subtle and easy on the eyes which I can't say about the Xbox 360s almost epilepsy inducing graphics but a major benefit to the Xbox 360s music playback is the fact that you can play music in game every game the ps3 and xbox360 can both be considered media center devices you can store and watch content from your device's hard drive but since the hard drives on the devices are quite limited it's possible to extend your digital media library and stream content for example off your PC I personally use Nero media home with my ps3 and Windows Media Center with my Xbox 360 streaming content using Nero is pretty straightforward when your media server is enabled on your PC an icon will appear automatically on the ps3 and you can access the content using the ps3 zone interface I use this feature a lot and it works mostly without a hitch you give me an explanation as to why the media center functionalities of the ps3 are very good the xbox360 has a major benefit which is this as you can see the Xbox 360 supports the full Windows Media Center experience and it works great with Windows 7 the interface is slick stable and it overall works great navigation wise it's almost perfect both the Xbox 360 and ps3 are capable media streaming devices but the Xbox 360 may have the slight edge with the slick and streamlined media center application media center capabilities go hand-in-hand with format support and thankfully the ps3 and xbox360 both have extensive format support both systems can handle h.264 and FX and the most common formats but it seemed that the PS we can handle the formats a bit faster when playing back some formats there's a subtle lag when rewinding on the Xbox 360 slightly disappointing with both systems is the fact that files with MKV wrappers are not supported DivX an X video probably the most common format you can find online but when you download content from online avoid using illegal torrents because if you do do what you want cause a pirate is free you are a pirate you're being a pirate is allegedly do what you want cause a pirate is free you are a pirate and that's all I have to say about that if you are the type to store pictures on your console the ps3 offers interesting ways of looking at your snapshots here's some shots I took with my cell phone the other day and as you can see there's some very cool ways of looking at your pictures on the ps3 you can look at pictures on your Xbox 360 but it's not as elegant and interface as on a ps3 if you haven't been living under a rock you've probably heard about 3d coming to game consoles at CES 2010 pretty much every TV manufacturer launch or announced their new TV models with 3d support the ps3 is backed up by Nvidia a company which already came out with 3d vision technology about a year ago I'm not sure if the ps3 will use this existing technology but in relation to media playback blu-ray gives a major benefit to 3d as blu-ray 3d will become the standard format for 3d movies and the ps3 supports this out of the box so the PS we may have a slight head start on 3d but some I have a feeling that by the time 3d hits the mass-market there will be a PlayStation 4 and there will be an Xbox 720 not to mention the Nintendo Wii 3d but the ps3 is more future-proof when it comes to media playback this installment is coming to an end and there's probably no surprises who takes this round the media center capabilities of the Xbox 360 are excellent it makes up for some shortcomings in functionality and speed of use but as an overall media playback device the ps3 takes the Xbox from 60 mostly thanks to you guessed it blu-ray the Xbox 360 has good DVD upscaling but of course there's really no competition in video playback the PSP supports more formats and has better overall media playback functionality the ps3 is up one point and in the next round we'll be comparing the best looking multi-platform games on both consoles stay tuned for the next installment of the console wars I'll be signing out