Firmware v2.20 bringing BD-Live to PS3

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Hi again everyone. Here’s a quick preview of the next PLAYSTATION 3 system software update coming up in the next few days. Firmware v2.20, introduces a number of features to further enhance your PLAYSTATION 3 as the hub of your entertainment center.

Most notably, the update enables the PS3 to support Blu-ray Disc Profile 2.0, also known as BD-Live. You can connect now to the Internet while playing discs that support BD-Live to obtain additional content and special features. These features vary from disc to disc, and will keep your BD discs fresh with new content and in some cases exclusive content only accessible to owners of BD-Live enabled discs. On April 8th Sony Pictures Home Entertainment will release The 6th Day and Walk Hard on Blu-ray; these titles will be among the first to take advantage of BD-Live. With this update, the PLAYSTATION 3 becomes the first Blu-ray player on the market with BD-Live functionality.

Here are some of the other new features/enhancements that will be included in Firmware v2.20:

  • The ability to copy PS3 Music and Photo playlists to a PSP system. We introduced the ability to create Music and Photo playlists on the PS3 in firmware update v2.0. Now you can easily export your playlists to your PSP.
  • You can now play DivX and WMV format files that are over 2 GB. In addition, you can now display subtitles when viewing DivX files.
  • Resume Play – begin playing a DVD or BD disc from the point where you previously stopped it, even if you eject the disc and insert a different movie or game.
  • Use your PSP as a remote control to play back your music files on your PS3 without turning on your TV.
  • The Internet browser now displays some web pages faster. In addition [Save Target] has been added as an option under file. This option lets you save a file that is linked to a web page to your PS3 hard drive or storage media.

There are a few other tweaks and upgrades included in v2.20 – we’ll provide more specifics as the update is about to go live.

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380 Comments

  • Wow..sounds like a really fantastic update! Great news!

  • Great update especially Resume Play! Is there any chance DTS-HD MA decoding could be implented any time soon? Because that’s the only thing I’m missing… :(

  • waiting for people to start whining about XMB

  • Great new features. Each one of them is useful. Awesome use of remote play with the TV off, for when you just want to listen to music from your PS3 through your home stereo system. The resume play function will come in handy, too.

  • i won’t whinning about xmb, but about the quality of the player.
    For a “media center”, i’m sorry to say that the compatibility with divx/MPEG-4 is BAD, Very BAD, as the compatibility with H.264 video (most of personnal encoded video are done with level High@5.1 or main@5.1, which aren’t supported by the ps3 which are limited to main@4.1, or high@4.1 (not sur for this one)).

    Just when we will see an upgrade about
    – more compatibility with video (Divx/MPEG-4, H.264 level 5.1, ogg, flac, ape)
    – more compatibility with format (ogm, mkv, ..)
    – bette retro compatibility with ps2/ps game, and ps2 video (my ps3 aren’t even capable of de-interlace video of FFXII !!)

    You see, we have a lot of room to whinning, not only the xmb :P

    Oh yeah, i forgot, does the 2.2 will re-enable the possibility to use memory frm the RSX unit under linux ? (yes , have a TRUE 2D access to play video, and another 256 Mb of ram is something which would be great).

  • @3: Give it time. Sony is on a tear lately, rapidly putting out all sorts of great content at an impressive clip; but there are always those who have to find something to whine and complain about nonstop.

  • AWESOME… This is a great update!

  • Great news. I like the resume play. It’ll make life easier with my three year old who is always swapping in and out discs. Once he forgot to take out the one that was in before inserting another! Had to take apart the PS3 to get them out! Anyway… two things missing fromt his update are: Please can we have another file format for external drives that allows us to use files bigger than 4gb. DIVX support is great but I think the PS3 is very fussy about what divx files it like. Lets relax!

  • I am very pleased to see the Playlist to PSP function. I have been waiting for that since 2.0. My work days will be even better now with this.

    Blu-ray 2.0 enables the BD to PSP feature on some discs, I hope we see this feature on many titles soon. I just got a 16GB MS just for when this starts happening.

    Great update can’t wait for it to go live.

  • Oh yeah! MKV file support so I don’t have to keep converting them to mp4 to get them to run on the PS3!

  • I’m thrilled to hear about these new features, but there seems to be this giant, gaping hole in all of this.

    I’ve heard so much talk about how powerful the PS3 is, but if you spend any time with the browser (or, heaven forbid, try to use web 2.0 apps like Pandora, Last.fm, etc) you’ll quickly find that the browser crashes, runs out of memory, etc. When are we going to see a fix for this? The device, when not running games, should have plenty of horsepower at its disposal – why not send some of that over to the browser?

    The PS3 stands to be a very strong bridge between net media and the living room, and so far is failing miserably. Nothing decent on the net works reliably – YouTube, GoogleVideo, Pandora, etc etc. I’m sure you hear back on your surveys that people don’t use the browser much – that’s true, it sucks to surf on a TV – but media… oh that’s something all together different!

    Don’t get me wrong, I love my PS3 – I stream media to it all the time, use it with my PSP, etc. But the other big question is… where’s the content? The PS3 has been around for a while now, heck… Sony is the producer of an enormous amount of media (TV, movies, music, etc) and yet none of that is available on this great system yet. The 360 has been doing this for ages now, but still no rentals or movies on the PS3.

    At any rate – these are my big concerns with the device, both seem pretty doable (well, the first certainly should be – if the Wii can do it, there is no excuse for the PS3 not to. The second – well, I do understand why this is terribly complicated, but I know I’ve heard about this media for ages and I’m still waiting to see it. I WANT to give you money, let’s get something going, aye?)

    Keep up the good work, though… I love seeing you guys continuing to add value to both the PSP and the PS3.

  • XMB where are you?

    And HOME? Are you just hidding sobe program bases in this faster and small firmware updates? :P

  • *sobe = some

  • I like Sobe. I haven’t drank one in ages, though.

  • great update but i would like to have also these things:

    1) start a chat with your buddies. when u join a game the chat is still working. so you can chat with your buddies in all the games.

    2) a bigger friendlist. my friendlist ist ALWAYS full :( need to be bigger with 70 spaces or even 100 spaces!!!!

    3) ingame xmb ;)

    4) sending videos, recorded with the playstation eye, to friends in your contact list.

    5) skype on ps3

    thx for listening :)

  • Thanks Sony. I know how hard you guys work to make the PS3 the best it can be.

    ~smile~ I would rather they work out all the kinks with in game XMB before releasing it. It would suck if they did release it early like everyone complains about, and it was buggy.

    Give Sony some time. Have faith.

  • Any chance you could explain this one further:

    Use your PSP as a remote control to play back your music files on your PS3 without turning on your TV

    Can’t we already do exactly that on Remote Play? I can’t see the difference.

  • Thanks for the update. Glad to hear you’re working on something each time.

  • MKV (LOST :P)support would be nice, also MOV (Lot’s of Digital Cameras are using this format sadly …mine too) support and SkyPE … It isn’t that much to ask …

  • anyhow, thanks for the update, I wonder when it will go online …

  • @17 You can’t play back the MP3s on your PS3 while doing remote play, it will be streamed to the PSP. What it means, probably, you will be able to hear it through your entertainment system this time while doing remote play.

  • love to hear it

  • I’m starting to love Sony/Playstation more and more.

  • Oh . . . . yeeeaaaah!! Now, THIS is what I’m talking about. Great update! Can’t wait to use the new features!

  • Some great fixes and features in this firmware update. Very much appreciated, especially the ‘resume play’ feature.

    DTS-MA decoding is the only thing missing when it comes to the PS3 being a complete Blu-ray player. If it’s unlikely to happen for whatever reason, it’d be nice to know so we could stop asking for it. I know I’ve been asking for it since April 2007 when I bought mine.

  • Sounds good, and the short time between these updates reminds me somehow the ol’ PSP updates.

    i wont say ingame XMB, but ( darn, i say it :P ) it would also be nice to see:

    – a clock while pressing the PS button just like
    in the PSP.

    – the option to copy our psone games on the PS3/PSP, a time lock up would be a way to prevent any bad usage of this option.

    – a fix in the PS2 compatibility, isn’t there a way that playing PS2 games doesn’t sign me off of the PSN?

    – i alredy gave up on a Mexican PSN, but would be nice that the US store acept our credit cards.

    Thank’s

    PSNid. Maverick_fox1

  • Great! I hope this update fixes the BD-rom problems I’ve been having.

  • Soon as I get my bravia I’ll be delighted about this update :-/

  • Great update, thanks. I’m really looking forward to the browser update. I hope http://icanhascheezburger.com/ will now display properly! After a night out my friends always want to see the latest LOLcats and the PS3’s browser always seems to have a big problem with the site.

    Feature requests and tweaks:

    Latest Flash player support in the browser

    New visualisations for the music player (the Earth one is lovely, how about adding in the moon and other planets on there too?)

    Get a decent writer for the news feed – someone who understands how to write informative titles to the articles (currently I have no idea what game is being referred to when I see the tabloid-style ambiguous titles scroll across the top corner of my screen and I’ve become bored of constantly checking to see if it’s a game I’m interested in).

    Make it easier to arrange media on my PS3 – creating and adding content to folders, for example

    Faster transfer of data from a PC – it takes several minutes to stream across 300MB, which is far slower than my connection speed, so what’s holding that back?

    Keep up the great work Sony!

  • And update to flash player in browser?

  • One more thing – the Wii’s weather and news channels are great – any chance of having something like that on the PS3?

  • “There are a few other tweaks and upgrades included in v2.20 – we’ll provide more specifics as the update is about to go live.”

    In-gam…..

    *gets shot*

    Seriously though, good update.

  • Thank you so much for these updates!

    The 2 gb limit was just stupid and was an obvious one to correct.

    But the feature of saving a bookmark in a DVD or BD movie is wonderful. And even if I eject it and insert another movie? That’s just phenomenal! I wonder how many movies it keeps track of though. Infinite? Surely the bookmarks would just need a few kilobytes of space?

  • Aaaaand improving backwards compatibility. It’s damn annoying that SSX On Tour keeps on crashing!

    (Then again, my 360 has just Red Ring Of Deathed, so at least the PS3 plays anything!)

  • Would I reading too much into your post Jeff, if we could at the very least presume that “Tweaks and Upgrades” implies In-Game XMB?

    Lol, probably not, but I can dream. Even if we don’t get it this is still a great update. Better than the massive disappointment of 2.17.

  • Where is the VIDEO PLAYLIST?? if you can do playlists for music why not music videos??

  • @31 why not just add some weather and news webpages to your favorites on the PS3 internet browser?

  • Thank you for Resume Play as its a feature I really miss from my old Sony DVD player. Looks like a great update.

  • Gah, I meant Eric, not Jeff. Sorry Mr Lempel and Mr Rubenstein for the confusion (leaves bowing head)

  • @37 Yep, I could do that, but it would be nice to not have to use the browser to get to the info I want. Having the weather predictions for the next five days on the bottom of the XMB screen would be very handy!

  • Holy Schnikes!

  • This is very nice thank you Sony But Let me ask a question When will we get confirmation date on the things we have been waiting 4ever i really wanna play killzone 2 n Socom confrontation i cannot wait Thanx SONY!

  • How about
    – DTS-MA -> PCM decoding?
    – A clock on the PS button menu?
    – .mkv support?

  • Nice update…

    But please can you give us at least some information about how you’re guys thinking about adding extra media support (Xvid, subtitles, …). If we know you’re not implementing it, I will stop hoping for it.

    Anyways… I think the PS3 has a lot more unlocked potential and I hope you guys keep up bringing us the keys!

    l:x

  • The “Save Target” feature is great!!! Thank you soo much! I liked how you could click Save Target on PSP, now I can do it on PS3!

    Thank you so much for your dedicated efforts to making the PS3 the #1 console!

    P.S. Now only if the web browser could have a flash update that would be sweet! Also, can you please make it so you can access the Internet Browser while in a chat? Right now it is extrememly boring to be in a chat with someone…you can’t even do anything!

    Nonetheless….thank you soo much!

  • Ooops… That last sentence doesn’t make sense…
    I was trying to be metaphorical and I failed big time.

    Anyways… I think the PS3 has a lot more to offer and I hope you guys keep bringing it to us!

  • i love all the updates comming out and i wont say a thing about the XMB, but what im dying for is PSN prepaid cards. give a lil love to those of us who dont want to use or have credit cards. Wii has them, M$ has them, why doesnt the PSN

  • They should really have an update where we can access our music during gameplay. i think that is a great idea. Otherwise, great update.

  • “SAVE TARGET AS” Woohoo! I can download porno! errr….whoops

    You gotta admit…its alot more entertaining reading that compared to “NO IN-GAME XMB?!? WTF?!?”

  • PLEASE bring back the SACD multi-channel to DTS conversion!! That was incredible for us who are stuck with optical!!! Please?? : (

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