News & Rumours: Playstation 4/ Orbis *spin*

H.265 supposedly features much improved compression, so as long as the console supports that you could fit 4K feature movies on current BR. Or that's the impression I got from some article I read on the subject somewhere anyway.

Then again, that piece might have been poisoned by biased PR fluff/spin, meaning 4K on 50GB BR would be akin to youtube 1080P streamed video, I'm not sure. Heh.

 

Why? If the next gen consoles have as low idle state why not let them be media devices too?

Though I can understand why Sony didn't include their features, plenty of people online bitched about wanting their gaming device to be completely about gaming. They got what they wanted and now some of those same people are bitching about it. (Not here) Typical hypocrisy.

Indeed this is funny to me.

 

Well that was damn fast.

 

Personally, I find it suboptimal to have a multitude of different devices in my living room entertainment rack ... the more my "main" device can do, the better ...

 

well, actually i bought the PS3 because it was on the best mediahubs when it came out, specially because it supported linux.

 

For videos I agree. But I've been using the DLNA/MP3 play back on the PS3 extensively because I am yet to find a client/device that can effictively stream my 50'000 song collection (ripped them myself before any accusations start) to the livingroom set-up as conviniently as my PS3 does it. Sure, you can get dedicated devices for that, but most of them are just awkward to use (considering my collection is split into thousands of folders representing genre, artist and cd name). Using a controller with an anolog stick is just way more convinient, faster and works. Try browsing through a list of hundreds of folders using a display and a mechanical button...

Having a beautifully animated earth / space theme while listening to music (on a huge projector) is quite nice actually too. Technically, I could use XBMC (which I already use for movies) but it just doesn't do as good a job as my PS3 does or looks as nice.

So, I was actually looking quite forward to see how PS4 might improve on this. To find out that they've canned it, is very disappointing IMO - especially considering that the whole DLNA/Mp3 player must be such a minor amount of code / effort that it reaks of cooporate decision. And as Shifty rightly put it previously - it goes a bit against the DNA of the PlayStation.

It's difficult to grasp why something that has been a rather good feature on the PS3 is no longer on board on PS4.

I don't necessarely want a device that does it all (like the Xbox One is going for), but it would be at least nice to have more or less parity with features existing owners have come to enjoy on the previous console. If apps make it to the PS4, I wouldn't mind if I had to buy an App that would let me access my DLNA content and play them while displaying a nice background animation or something.

 

With throttling, you don't need to be overkill. And buying two collections of CPU+GPU+RAM+HDD to split the workload that one device can do is just as much overkill. As it's just software, there's no real reason to avoid it. The distinction between any of these boxes is just the software; the hardware makeup is basically identical from PVR to PC to console to media player. Surely it's just as stupid to buy two devices to perform the tasks that one is very capable of doing as it is to buy...two TVs, one for TV programs and one for movies.

I can see a business reason not to want to get involved in managing a media software, because media is such a disastrous mess that you have significant compatibility and support issues, but it's certainly not a good idea two require two similar boxes to the jobs that one can do, not in terms of consumer economics nor environmental impact.

Are they really the same individuals? Or are you taking a load of individuals posting in a community as representative of the views of that whole community? I know I have no idea who on this board has said what over the years regards various policies, save for a few strong opinions that have been repeated, so I'd be clueless as to whether anyone's being hypocritical or not. I'd have to log opinions if I wanted to make that sort of comparison months later. Now my people skills aren't great, but I'm still sceptical that anyone visiting fora can keep tabs on the opinions of populations of hundreds or thousands of voices.

 

according to the ultimate ps4 faq no 4k support at the moment
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/10/30/ps4-the-ultimate-faq-north-america/

 

But that also says that 4k games are currently not supported. Currently. Does that mean they might be in the future?

Not that I think it will; but imagine the twitter meltdown if, just as the xb1 was getting to 1080p, the PS4 starts rolling out 4k.

 

Or that the xb1's scaler supports upscaling to 4k, but the PS4's scaler doesn't ...

Anyway, for games, 4k support will mostly only be interesting for 2D games - most 3D stuff would run like shit at 4k.

 

PS3 owners are used to their console being able to do more than "just" games. On my PS3 i have a bunch of vacation pictures, some video, music etc. And i used to stream videos via PS3 Media server. It did alot more than just play games and blurays

What i think you are thinking about is the bitching about the sports and tv presentation from Microsoft, which spilled over to the PS4 being ALL about games. Sure the PS4 is more game centric, but dropping features was not what the ordinary PS3 user expected.

I can live with most of the drops today, but i don't like the lack of MP3 file support for custom soundtrack in games. And DNLA was a very neat feature..

 

Don't they have the same scaler? Both are AMD 7xxx GPU's afterall.

dat 32 rops

 

External HDD or thumbsticks are NOT supported on PS4? This is a serious blow. I wonder if this is to prevent piracy...

 

They didn't say it doesn't support external HDD or USB sticks. They said you can't expand the internal HDD with an external one. Expand.

 

What? I"m pretty sure it says it doesn't support external HDD at all, and if you want more capacity you have to replace the internal drive. If you have another interpretation of what this means, I'd be interested to hear it:

 

Maybe I'm interpreting it wrong? Doesn't support adding HDD "to expand storage" is ambiguous, I thought the question means like the XB1 which has this feature planned in the future, but not at launch.

 

Doesn't seem ambiguous. Not sure what else it could mean.

 

They don't talk about what file types though. Will you be able to use a USB drive to transfer savegame files over (something we use playing FIFA)? What about plugging in an HDD full of home movies? The FAQ is clear that you won't be able to save any games on USB device, but sin't clear about whether USB devices are supported in any form (from a quick glance. Haven't read it all the way through).

 

@ no external HDD:

And here was I actually fearing that I could potentially run into the same 4GB filesize limits as present on PS3 ... I guess that won't be an issue now

Oh well ... as many people suggested when I brought up that topic a while ago, streaming videos from a network HDD will be better anyway ... wait ... right ... no DLNA.

Good to know I can at least listen to my MP3 ... oh, I see. That's probably asking a little too much. But hey - they promised to look into that, right?

It will be a funny sight to behold when they announce that they're eventually going to support mp3 playback - only for people to realize that they'll have to burn their mp3's to a DVD in a desperate attempt to somehow get them onto their PS4 HDD.

Open entertainment systems that make your life easier are sooo last gen.

 

On PS3, you could put mp3 and h.264 mp4 files on a USB hard drive and play them through XMB. You could also have multiple backups of the internal hard drive, size permitting.

Neither of those uses really count as 'expanding storage', because you couldn't use the USB drive for downloaded games, game installs from disc, save games and etc.