Sunday, September 6, 2009

Back in action

12:20 PM / Blu-ray / Comments4 Comments

Blu-ray

I'm slightly late in reporting this, but the good news is that, as of the latest firmware patch for the Playstation 3, 50 Hz Blu-ray content will no longer "crash" NTSC-territory machines. If you have a title like the Australian version of The Descent, which as of the 2.70 patch, would grind to a halt and spit out an error code as soon as it encountered 50 Hz content (in the case of The Descent, this included the copyright warning, preventing the disc from playing at all), then worry not - upgrade to version 3.0 and your system will revert to its old ways, skipping over unplayable content rather than stopping the disc completely.

Of course, in an ideal world, Sony would have patched NTSC-territory systems to actually play 50 Hz content, but there can be little doubt that the current situation, while not ideal, is vastly preferable to what we've been faced with since mid-June. Kudos to Sony for actually taking this issue on board and fixing it instead of leaving the minority of their customers who own discs with 50 Hz content (purchased from other territories) high and dry. It would be nice if more manufacturers showed this sort of commitment.

Source: AV Science Forum

 
4 Comments

1. Count Fosco said:

Sadly, the latest firmware patch from Sony has actually broken one the console's best exclusive games UNCHARTED: DRAKE'S FORTUNE for many users, myself included.

I can't believe that they can release an unavoidable upgrade which renders a prime piece of software useless. I'm doubly gutted as I've only just bought the disc for myself having previously played a friend's copy. The game (which previously worked perfectly, now freezes up and crashes after a couple of minutes of play).

I for one, am disgusted and want the option to revert back to the previous PlayStation firmware now and a proper fix to come in the near future. Failing that, the games developer should be working toward a patch to work around the issue in recognition of the amount of people who purchased the game.

Come on Sony/Naughty Dog pull your fu@K~ng finger out!

(Posted on Sunday, September 6, 2009 at 1:31 PM)

2. Author Profile Page Michael said:

Oof, I'm sorry to hear that. That's a pretty major cock-up on their part and I hope they fix it for you, one way or the other, before too long.

(Posted on Sunday, September 6, 2009 at 5:02 PM)

3. Christopher D. Jacobson said:

Yeah, the new firmware crashing a game like that is definitely bogus. I'm happy, however, that I'll be able to buy and watch the Australian BD of The Descent now.

(Posted on Sunday, September 6, 2009 at 10:03 PM)

4. Bleddyn Williams said:

I am on firmware 2.60, installed by the Ghostbusters blu-ray. I too have the Australian version of the Descent, and thought at some point, a Region A blu-ray would need a newer firmware, which would turn my Descent into a coaster.

When I heard about this problem being skipped by the 3.0 firmware, I thought about installing it, but then thought - why bother? My PS3 is currently fine the way it is.

Thanks for the warning, Count - Uncharted is one of my favourite PS3 games! To hell with this firmware until they get it right.

Those of you looking for a budget version of a region-free player with PAL to NTSC conversion, check out the Momitsu clones at half the price - the Vision Quest & the Sherwood. I bought mine for $159. Only drawback is that it resets to Region A when you turn it off, so a six-digit code is needed on startup for multi-region playback. As I intend to only use this as my secondary player for non-Region A discs this isn't the worst thing in the world. If you paid $200 more for the Momitsu you would still have to do this.

(Posted on Sunday, September 6, 2009 at 10:17 PM)

 
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