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It's pretty clear by now that Blu-ray won the high definition video disk war. By the end of this year HD-DVD could be a distant memory and those who want to watch High Definition movies will need a Blu-ray player. There are a bunch of options out there for those in the market, and the Sony PlayStation 3 has been talked about as the most capable player available. For a long time it was the least expensive way to get a Blu-ray player. That isn't true anymore, but it's still close. It's currently available in two models, a 40 GB model for $399.99 and an 80 GB model for $499.99. Today we'll ignore the gaming side for the most part and look at how it performs as a home theater device.

Sony PS3 in the Home Theater

There are a few differences between the 40 GB and 80 GB models, other than the obvious difference in storage space, but for this discussion they aren't very important. Both models are High Definition (1080p) capable, have Blu-ray players built in, support HDMI 1.3 and can connect to your network either wired or via WiFi. For what we need, they both work. But as an aside, if you own a PS2 and want to play all those existing games, you need to go with the more expensive 80 GB model, since it's the only one that supports backward compatibility. At a glance the Blu-ray player supports 1080p video and 7.1 channel audio, the HDMI 1.3 connection allows for deep color content and it can upconvert standard DVDs to 1080p as well.

So how about the PS3 as a Blu-ray player? In a lot of cases the primary motivator for buying a PS3 is to get Blu-ray playback. In that capacity it does a great job with playback, but may have some usability issues. First, the playback. The video looks absolutely stunning and the audio quality is amazing. We haven't seen Blu-ray look or sound any better than on the PS3, nor have we seen it any worse, but that just means it is as good as any Blu-ray player out there. You do not suffer any quality loss because it's a gaming console and not a dedicated player.

As for usability however, it's not the 100% experience you'd want. First off, the Blu-ray remote, the one that allows you to control the PS3 as a player instead of using the game controller, is an add-on accessory. If Sony really wants to market the PS3 as a Blu-ray player, that remote should really be bundled in the box. It's only $24.99, ($19.99 online) not a deal breaker by any stretch, but you know what we're saying. Trying to control a Blu-ray movie with the game controller is possible, but not practical or even really that pleasant. After you add the remote, you can control the Box just like it's a stand-alone Blu-ray player. It works really well for that. Unfortunately it doesn't work using IR, it uses Bluetooth. So your Harmony or other Universal remote can't control it. There are some adapter devices out there, but they don't get you all the way there, closer, but not all the way. We have a listener review of one on Episode 236.

We all know that not all Blu-ray players are created equal. They support different audio codecs, some support interactivity, others don't, etc. It's the whole Blu-ray profile 1.0, 1.1., 2.0 mess we've talked about in the past. One big benefit of the PS3 is that it was designed to be Internet connected and upgradable, so it's pretty easy to add new functionality as it gets finalized by the Blu-ray group. The PS3 will be among the first players to offer support for BDLive, or Internet-enabled interactive Blu-ray content. The rumor is that a new firmware update will be available for the PS3 as early as May or June or this year, which coincides with the market release of the first stand-alone BDLive enabled players. As to audio codecs, the PS3 supports the standard Dolby Digital and DTS, and the new Dolby TrueHD (PCM/onboard decoding, not Bitstream) but not the new DTS HD. It's unclear whether or not the PS3 will ever support DTS HD, and there are a few players on the market that do, so in that regards you might be missing a little.

But the PS3 can also do a little bit more, it actually has some non-Blu-ray home theater features to consider. If you buy the PS3 as a Blu-ray player, these are added bonuses, as are the gaming abilities, but they're in there, so we'll talk about them. First off the user interface on the PS3 is really slick. Very easy to navigate and easy to understand. If you start it up with a disc in the drive, or insert one after starting it up, it will go straight to the disc, bypassing the interface entirely, but if you do need to poke around in there, it's pretty simple. And while poking around in there you'll find support for media playback. You can play local content downloaded from the Internet or on USB portable storage, or stream from the network. To stream from the network you need to have a DLNA server to dish out the files, but those are easy to find. Here's a lit of a bunch of options here and here.

The PS3 works well as a network player, but the interface isn't all that sexy. It gets the job done, but without the "wow" factor. It will playback audio, as MP3 or WMV, photos, and MPEG-4 videos including support for DIVX. Many DLNA servers will actually transcode video on the fly to match what the PS3 needs, but not all of them, so you may need to do some re-encoding. We watched I Am ... not going to tell you what we watched, but we did watch a few movies over the network and they looked and sounded fine. Obviously the better the compression the better they'll look. As a network based audio/video player, it works. But don't buy it specifically for that. Downloaded movie trailers looked absolutely amazing, so the PS3 is certainly capable of some awe inspiring video playback. There is the option to install another OS on the PS3, but we haven't gotten that deep into it yet to comment on how well it works. There are differing reports on the Internet about it.

Overall the PS3 is a great Blu-ray player and upconverting DVD player, does a solid job playing network content, and is actually a really good game platform as well, if anyone is still interested in that. For $399 it really makes a lot of sense because of the upgradability and future-proof nature of the architecture.