Japan gets Torne PS3 DTV DVR adapter in May, all is right with the world
By Tim Stevens 
posted January 14th 2010 7:51AM
posted January 14th 2010 7:51AM
posted January 14th 2010 7:51AM
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Man, the U.S. never gets anything (Crosses Arms).
Well Europe has been taken care of and so has Japan, so I wonder who is left?
@bagbozo
::::hanging head low:::: I hope ours is cablecard ready when it comes to the States. We never get good sidekicks for our PS3. It can't be that hard Sony! ::::kicking rocks down the street::::
@bagbozo U.S. never gets anything? LOL :o) I'd say there are only a few things Europe gets on the PS3... most of them totally useless, of course. I know it, I live here ;o)
@bagbozo Do I really have to say the original iPhone, PS3, games in general, Nexus One (ok, it's also available in UK, but only as a test)?
I love my PlayTV tuner, but it doesn't like the Danish MPEG-4 (HD) channels - and it's only for Freeview.
@bagbozo
It's not that we live in the U.S. It's all Sony. Overpromise, underdeliver. See: PlayStation 2 HDD, GPS on PSP, mylo, and the list goes on...
@bagbozo Rest of Asia.
@bagbozo I'm with you. Don't we deserve some love. Sony have really missed the boat with this in the USA. MS continues to get the jump on it with Netflix and now AT&T UVersrse for XBOX360.
(i know netflix is avaliable on ps3 but only after ms beat them 2 it)
C'mon Sont be a leader not a follower.
@bagbozo
South America at this rate will get it years before we do.
ya... we'll just let ^their PS3's overheat watching the Mythbusters Marathons...
@bagbozo You think the US never gets anything, try Canada buddy!!!
Man... why does Japan get all the fun stuff?... For once i would like the U.S. to get something first for a change :*(
though the thing looks cool anyways... maybe sometime in 2011 we will get it.
ROFL you two shuld try living in canada. You want to talk about never getting anything look at us!
@morikaweb amen to that! Rogers has the lockdown on HD, we HAVE to use Hauppage HD PC cards, and even then we still need to buy a frikki'n Rogers tuner box (No cablecard in Canada)
@morikaweb
Not to mention no streaming netflix on PS3, Xbox or blu-ray players. I have IPTV such a device would not be much use to me either.
@morikaweb They lock down things so bad here in Canada that it's easier to just acquire your shows by alternative means.
I think the PS3 needs more USB ports with all the USB addons available.
Still a great machine but more USB would be handy.
@ChazClout
Speculating that ours will probably have an extra usb built in. We can't keep pluging in and unplugging stuff, it will wear the ports out way too fast.
@Shanne69
With $20, you can get a hub for 3 adicional usb ports.
http://www.amazon.com/PS3-Media-Hub-Playstation-3/dp/B001BSA5Z0/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1263475645&sr=1-2
@Shanne69 USB Hubs
It's nice to have a TV console convergence, but I've already invested in HTPC setup. I'm torne.
@lecti: I went the HTPC route last summer and there's no way I'd ever look back at a console solution. The convenience and flexibility far outweigh the relatively minor expense (with an ION based setup).
europe and australia has playtv hardware. we use DVB.
north america (US and canada), and japan is using ASTC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Digital_broadcast_standards.svg
playtv will make your tivo obsolete...
Nope, for terrestrial broadcasts, Japan uses ISDB-T, completely different from both DVB-T and ATSC.
I think the original post means "touted" on the first line. Unless they meant to say the features were pulled taut, in which case by all means, leave it the way it is.
@sugosugita Indeed, thanks, fixed.
I have always said Microsoft should come out with a home theater 360. It would have more of a traditional home theater equipment look so it looks like it fits in the rack, has at least 2 digital cable card tuners, and a separate internal 3.5 drive for recordings.
The plug arrangement makes me wonder if it only displays video using a pass-through arrangement, or if can actually stream the video into the PS3? Why else would it need two video plugs on the back?
Those plugs are just antenna in and out as passthrough to the TV, all video is processed by the PS3.
That would be cool if Sony partnered with DirecTV and Tru2Way to offer a plugin HD Tuner with a dual tuner. They could do two versions. One that had a DTV Access Card slot and one that had a Cable Card slot. That would be cool to surf the web and watch TV at the same time on PS3 however the PS3's web browser stinks and freezes alot.
Actually, now that CableLabs seems to be budging a bit on some of their OEM requirements, it's at least vaguely more likely that we could see a CableCard tuner for the PS3 or 360.
@erwos I don't see there being a cablecard tuner for the XBox360. You can already watch and record encrypted live cable TV. All you have to do is put that CableCard tuner on a Windows 7 PC in your house and have the XBox360 set to run as an extender. It is a pretty simple and reliable way to accomplish the same purpose.
The only significant difference in price with the extender model, at least in regards to Cable TV, is that you need a PC running Windows 7. Of course whatever price you pay for a low end Win7 PC would probably be cheaper than what it would cost to get MS to sell you a 500GB HDD you would need for recordings on for the Xbox360.
I am looking for a cheap DVR solution. If this thing will let me schedule recording terrestrial HDTV, I'd be ALL over it.
Could someone please explain the attraction of using my Playstation as a DVR?
First off, if the PS3 is recording something, it's going to be too busy to do what it was originally designed to do - play my games, or at the very least, my movies. One of the reasons I started using a Tivo 10 years ago was because it let me play games or watch a DVD without having to miss my shows. Convergence may be nifty to think about, but that doesn't mean you can shove any 2 devices together and expect the result to be equally nifty - or cost effective.
Second, even if you upgrade the PS3's hard drive yourself, you're only looking at 500GB of internal storage. Even if this thing supports external hard drives for transferring shows and watching them (similar to DishNetwork's DVRs) that's still a lot of extra cash to do something most of us just pay $5 or $10/month for, up to 1TB available, depending on the DVR.
Third is the tuner problem. CableCard is available, sort of, but satellite folks are still left out in the cold here. So unless this is only going to be used to record OTA and plain old unencrypted analog cable (assuming that even still exists) you're looking at an even more convoluted setup of trying to get your tuner box to work with this thing.
I know a lot of folks here balk at the idea of renting something they feel they should be able to build and own, but honestly, I don't see the logic. With my provider, I'm paying $5/mo for DVR service. They own the DVR hardware. If it breaks - as mine did recently - they replace it, free. I'm also eligible for a free hardware upgrade every 2 years. Yeah, I'll never own the hardware, and if I switch providers, I'll have to give it back and go with the new provider's solution. But even at $10/mo, I really don't see how I can buy or build another solution that would be equally effective, and more importantly, cheaper in the long run WITHOUT becoming hopelessly outdated.
Example: I could either spend $1500 building a HTPC setup, or spend $10/mo for a DVR from my provider. If I go with the HTPC, it will have function more than a decade without any changes other than just software upgrades for it to become more cost-effective than having rented a DVR for those past 10 years. Remember, this means no new hard drives to replace broken ones, or even just increase my storage capacity, no new CPU or memory to increase performance - doing so would only increase the amount of money I've put into my HTPC, and also increase how many years it would take for my investment to overtake renting a DVR. How many pieces of hardware do you own are still heavily used after 10 solid years of use?
@amuro98
I'll talk on situations in Japanese;
>First off, if the PS3 is recording something, it's going to be too busy
Not exactly. Torne lets you do everything(except PS2 game emulations) while recording. PS3 is a multi-
core computer with 2 PowerPCs and some SIMD accelerator. Plus, the Japanese DTV standard, ISDB-T, uses
MPEG2-TS so there's virtually no need of CPU power for recording.
>that's still a lot of extra cash to do something most of us just pay $5 or $10/month for, up to 1TB available,
>depending on the DVR.
That doesn't apply to Japanese market. I've never heard of a service like that in Japan.
>CableCard is available, sort of, but satellite folks are still left out in the cold here.
For all of free channels and some of paid satellite channels we have some hardware to record them DRM-free so at
least we do have a fire outside :)
I know that most of all I'm saying doesn't apply to USA...
PS3 do had big hard drive, it make sense for use as DVR. Cable company should work with sony make this happend in the U.S.
Lol, I dunno why some people are complaining about the US not getting anything. Id' LOVE to have some of the stuff the US has/had (US only phones, internet services that doesn't block me when I don't live in the US, like Hulu and some parts of iTunes, games being released in US before EU pretty often and such). Even worse for me, since I live in an almost Liechtenstein-sized country. *sigh*
...
Okay, rant. But a DVR adaptor for the PS3 would be LOVE. Seriously. *doesn't have a DVR, never had one* xD
I'd rather they team up with SlingMedia and develop an application that will allow me access to my Slingbox.
Hmm, rather just keep using my computer with its tuner card, my console is for games. This is just more wear and tear.
I'm sure Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, etc have something to do with the US being the last (or never) to get TV recording related gadgets from Asia and Europe....
As almost all southamerican countries adopted ISDB-Tb, an enhanced Brazilian/Japanese TDT version with h.264 and AACv2 codecs that already exist in PS3, if SONY "remember" that it was one of the fighter for this new niponbrazilian ISDB-T version, for shore they made this for old and new versions of the standard.
If not, it will pay with more market loss which started when the 1Seg PSP tuner did not worked in Brazil as the 2006 new standard started.
Does anyone know how or if Torne differs from Play TV?
I was going to get a Play TV, but decided against it when I discovered that it doesn't have RF pass-through. As I live in an apartment building, I don't have a strong enough signal to split it.
Why Sony released Play TV without RF pass-through is ridiculous and baffling to me.
So many cables !
I really want that new Sony TV with Wi-Fi ...
I hate cables ..!
It's perfect to connect vaio laptop or ps3 via Wi-Fi straight to Big Screen ..
Strange that it took Japan this long to get an equivalent system.
My UK PlayTV box records the freeview TV MPEG2 stream as .m2ts files, the file sizes vary greatly depending on the channel. You have to keep an eye on it, as anything bigger than 4GB can't be copied onto USB drives. I upgraded my PS3s HDD to 320GB and the old 80GB HDD now resides in an 2.5" enclosure, still in use as a backup drive.
You can play the files in VLC, or convert to MP4 with Handbrake. Very useful as using the ffmpeg codec encodes very quickly for my ipod classic.