PlayTV

Went up town and bought a gadget. What are the chances? Sony have released their PlayTV add-on. This turns your PS3 into digital video recorder with two tuners. It works well, although it is a bit expensive at 69 quid. Some time back I got a complete recorder for around the same price. However, if you want to watch and record TV via your PS3 and you don't want to have to put another box under your telly then it is well worth a look.

The picture is good, although they don't seem to be doing the fancy upscaling thing that the PS3 does with DVDs, which makes them look really amazing and close to Blu-Ray in quality (which probably counts as a bit of an own goal really).

You can stream video off the PS3 onto a Playstation Portable over local WiFi and even configure your router to allow you to watch home telly using your PSP from anywhere in the world. Some time ago I had a thing called a Slingbox which did something similar with a home video signal, but that could target PCs rather than the PSP.

One other thing which is nice is that the system supports Digital Teletext too, which puts it one up on the Windows Media Centre (although it won't record all the episodes of a program automatically, which probably puts it one down again).

The only thing I really don't like is the way that the device (which is a rather ugly little box) connects to the USB cable on the front of the PS3, leaving a wire trailing across the front. The Xbox 360, rather cleverly, has a USB port at the back for connecting devices like this, which is a bit neater.

If you haven't got a video recorder, but you have a PS3, this is well worth a look.

Comments

[Pom]

I recently purchased a similar device for my Archos 605 WIFI portable media player.

[Burkey]

I was originally interested in this, but it would mean moving my TV cable back and forth to the PS3 any time I wanted to use it as I wouldn't really want to have my PS3 running every time I wanted to watch TV normally. Either that or split the cable and lose signal quality, which also isn't really desirable. Anyone else got any ideas?

[Rob]

Hmmm. It doesn't have a signal pass through for the arial but you could get a passive splitter and a couple of cables for only a pound or two.

Alternatively you can also get powered splitters for around ten quid. The actual PlayTV box seems very sensitive, and the thing about digital video is that a slightly poorer signal won't have any discernible effect.