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PS3 or BluRay player?

Started by HappyTree, February 07, 2011, 12:26:45 AM

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HappyTree

I have an Xbox 360, I love it. Mainly because of the controller.

But I now have a new TV and BluRay has become attractive to me. Don't have a player. Is it worth getting a PS3 for BluRay playback? I may find the free online stuff interesting and maybe some of the Sony exclusives would be good. Or should I just get a normal BluRay player?

Depressed Beyond Tables

PS3. Playing movies/BluRay rips through the USB is worth it alone.

Long term, HD won't matter to most people. There are only a handful of films a year that have the budget to really make use of it. These same films get played in sub-TV quality cinemas all over the world. Baffling.


Personally, I'd only buy a BluRay player if I was planning on keeping it in bubble wrap so as it's worth something in 30 years.

chocky909

What size is your TV and how close do you sit to it?

If you've got a big TV then HD is important. Even the best DVDs look a bit shite on a 40"+ screen, well, depending on how close you are to it that is. As for only some films benefitting from HD. well that's pretty much bollocks. I've got a Blu Ray of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre which was filmed on 16mm and is old, dirty and scratched and it looks great in all it's high def, grimy glory. Any film, properly transferred is better purely for the clarity of whatever is on that film print.

Now whether Blu Ray is worth it over HD rips is another question. For that reason Blu Ray might not be around half as long as DVD.

PS3s were very good value as they are good Blu Ray players (if you get the remote) and the software gets updated online. Now that you can get a very decent standalone player for around £80, the difference in price if you're not intending to use the console for anything else is a bigger consideration.

Mister Six

Do PS3s still have stupidly slow 2x Blu-Ray drives in them? Would a dedicated Blu-Ray drive be faster?

Because boy howdy, they are slow.

Depressed Beyond Tables

Yeah Texas Chainsaw Massacre, man. Gritty. I'm assuming that's the remake you have. Heh

HappyTree

40", sit about 2m from it.

Don't know if I'd use the PS3 that much for gaming as I don't like the controller. I guess if BluRay players are cheaper there's not much point in buying a console just for that. Cheers.

chocky909

You're definately close enough to a 40" to feel the benefit from HD. You can get an decent LG for £70 but you could make a more informed decision with a little peruse on AV Forums.

The real cost will be the discs themselves and building up a decent collection, but you can't beat the high bitrate of a good Blu Ray. Also, you might want to look into getting a Blu Ray player with decent media playing capabilities depending on how many video files you have on your PC that you'd like to watch on your TV via USB or networking. Even consider a dedicated Media Player like a WDTV which will play almost anything you can throw at it up to 1080p so long as you update the firmware regularly.

HT, you said in the other thread you've got a fancy-pants Samsung telly, so chances are you'll be able to plug a USB stick or hard drive into it and play AVI/MKV files off it if you want to. MKV files might need a little bit of tweaking to run (nothing major, but depending on the audio format they might need to be run through conversion software, and if they've got subtitles that you want to use then another converter program is required), so if it's a feature you're going to use then feel free to give us a shout if you want a hand sorting it out; I haven't got my Samsung TV any more but I'll do what I can to help out.

HappyTree

I use the PC with an HDMI cable into the TV as a second monitor. I presume if I have a BluRay/HD rip it'll play fine?

chocky909

That's down to your PC's capabilities really. If you're playing 1080p or even 720p files you might get problems with audio sync or stuttering especially with processes running in the background. There are various Windows media players that perform differently. Download some assorted HD files and try playing them.

mobias

Quote from: Mister Six on February 07, 2011, 12:57:47 AM
Do PS3s still have stupidly slow 2x Blu-Ray drives in them? Would a dedicated Blu-Ray drive be faster?


No, the new PS3's have faster Blu-ray drives. However even the older ones like mine with the slower drives aren't bad for watching movies. Its loading games that takes longer

mobias

Quote from: HappyTree on February 07, 2011, 01:25:11 AM

Don't know if I'd use the PS3 that much for gaming as I don't like the controller.

If you're genuinely into gaming then it seems a bit daft to miss out on some of the best games out there simply because of the controller. I hate the 360 controller but I put up with it for the likes of Gears of War. 

buntyman

I have a standalone, reasonbly highly rated Sony Blu Ray player and it takes ages to load up the discs too. It does operate quietly though which is a more important feature for me. I also have the HD DVD add on for the Xbox which, in my opinion is at least as good (takes no time to load up and PQ is not noticably different) but because of the loud fan whirring that the Xbox makes, it can be quite distracting when watching a film.
Incidentally, I rarely buy Blu Rays as they're way too expensive but I pay £4 to get a couple a month through Tesco's Lovefilm service which has done me fine.

There are comments about this (including mine) in this thread.

Consignia

Frankly, for the money you are getting a decent Blu Ray player, and a good selection of exclusive games. Sure, it doesn't support MKV, but I've found most dedicated media players finicky with such formats and require a modicum of re-encoding anyway. Unless you are absolutely never going to play games on it, get a PS3.

HappyTree

Well I'd only want the PS3 for playing actual BluRay discs since I have the PC hooked up to the telly all the time anyway through HDMI. I've not had any stuttering problems playing the few HD AVIs/MKVs I've downloaded, though I suspect they were 720p. I'm downloading a 1080p file now to see if that will play ok, I don't anticipate any problems as the PC is just over a year old, quite fast and has 3gigs ram.

So maybe I don't need a BluRay player at all. Maybe it will become useful when the discs themselves come down in price.

One question springs to mind: if I play a 1080p file on the telly with the resolution set to 1360 x 768 as it is now, am I right in assuming that it will play at that resolution? It won't magically change to 1920 x 1080, but will scale down the image size? So if I want to get the best out of the large video file I'd change the resolution to 1920 x 1080 beforehand?

I don't use that highest resolution as it's too small to see properly, since I use the TV as a second monitor and the whole point of having a large monitor is to use the computer at a distance, thus not knackering my eyes.

Consignia

If you have a PC, why don't you just buy a Blu Ray drive for it? They are seriously cheap.

Mister Six

Quote from: mobias on February 07, 2011, 09:00:02 AM
No, the new PS3's have faster Blu-ray drives. However even the older ones like mine with the slower drives aren't bad for watching movies. Its loading games that takes longer

It takes bloody ages to load the menu screens for Blu-Ray movies though. I watched a bunch of films on my mate's PS3 and we were waiting for minutes sometimes.

Mister Six

Quote from: HappyTree on February 07, 2011, 11:03:19 AM
Well I'd only want the PS3 for playing actual BluRay discs since I have the PC hooked up to the telly all the time anyway through HDMI.

WARNING! Neil buggered up his TV using it to display PC images. It was a plasma telly, admittedly, so I don't know if it's a problem that will affect you. Still, read this: http://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=27011.0

HappyTree

Thanks but I already had this problem. I've been using a 28" Samsung LCD TV as a second monitor for the last 4 years. Since it's the second monitor I never had the START bar at the bottom in the first place. The only issue was a slight burn-in of the Firefox browser title and menu bar at the top.

I just learned not to keep the TV displaying any browser page for long periods of time. Sometimes I'd forget and go off to cook, coming back to some screen burn of the text I'd left it on. It faded quite quickly, it was never a real problem. I could live with the FF title bar at the top, I never noticed it when watching full screen video.

And I have the habit of simply turning the TV off if I'm not actively using the PC and moving things around or watching video.

That was LCD, I believe LED is similar or perhaps even better. The manual says I should not leave anything static on the screen for more than 4 hours. I presume after a few months using it I'll have the same small issue of the FF title bar, it's really not a problem.

Neil's problem was that perhaps Plasma is more susceptible to this and he left a very high contrast image on screen for ages. Plus he used it as his primary monitor so he didn't have the choice of switching it off. I'd never use the TV as my only monitor, it's very handy to keep the START bar and icons on one dedicated computer monitor screen to the side. I wonder why they don't make TVs out of the same stuff they use for computer monitors, they never get any screen burn at al.

I got that contrast problem on the LCD when playing a PC adventure game for hours in 4:3 format, but it faded after a few days.

Cheers for the heads-up though, I will be careful with this TV too. I won't stop using it as a second monitor as that is the only thing I bought the TV for, I never watch actual TV as I download everything and can't be arsed watching Estonian TV anyway, heh. Maybe I will a little when I start learning Estonian again in earnest, but TV as a TV was never why I got the thing.

mobias

Quote from: Mister Six on February 07, 2011, 11:11:30 AM
It takes bloody ages to load the menu screens for Blu-Ray movies though. I watched a bunch of films on my mate's PS3 and we were waiting for minutes sometimes.

Something wrong with his PS3 then because I have one of the old PS3's with a x2 speed reader and it takes way less than a minute to load a menu, we're talking seconds. I've never once noticed it being a long load time for any Blu-ray movie. Games however are another matter entirely.....