Update: And here's another. Reader Joel has forwarded screens of what appears to be yet another variation of the Netflix interface that is appearing on his 80GB PS3, while some commenters also report they're not seeing the video browsing option yet. Check the gallery for more pictures and a video after the break.
One major issue that a few are experiencing is that the app is region locked, and will only work on consoles purchased in North America, unlike the disc which worked on any PS3 as long as you were logging in from the US. Netflix confirmed to us that it's aware of the issue and it expects to have it taken care of by an update in the next month or so. Other questions we've heard concern the video quality, and whether it is 1080p or 1080i, we asked Netflix and were told the following:
As far as being able to tell if you're getting a 1080p stream, as we mentioned in our video walkthrough, hitting the "select" button on the PS3 controller shows the video and audio quality, with X-High indicating the highest quality stream available, although there's no way to tell specifically if that's 720p or 1080p. We can say from the video we've checked out, some streams definitely appear sharper than they did previously in 720p and with few compression artifacts. While it's not Blu-ray quality, it's on par with the best video we usually get from cable or satellite."As for the 1080i confusion - Our 1080 sources are either interlaced or progressive. All of our 1080 encodes are progressive. This means that we do perform conversion of 1080i sources to 1080p at encoding time. We use industry-standard tools to execute the conversion."
A few more specific complaints we've heard from some corners are that the Netflix app now requires a PlayStation Network ID to use, and that it no longer works with IR remotes since it relies on the PS button on the controller. We're still not sure what to do on the latter, although the AVSForum thread indicates a few users have been able to map their Harmony remotes to work properly, however the former seems to be a necessary tradeoff. Obviously using the new app means updating your firmware and losing OtherOS and possibly some jailbroken capabilities, but for most gamers, remaining logged in and able to check the status of friends on the PSN is a very worthwhile feature. Our major complaint with the new app has to do with the video browsing feature. While it worked long enough for us to get our video walkthrough done, it crashed and locked up our PS3 slim multiple times while casually browsing. We're not sure if this is an isolated occurrence, but were note sure this particular item is ready for prime time yet, and is probably why it wasn't originally mentioned.