My first PS3 PPV IPTV experience

December 15th, 2009 No Comments »

Need a translation?? It means that for the first time ever I paid to watch a movie on my PlayStation 3 streamed over the Internet. I mentioned a few weeks back that Sony had opened a movie rental service on their PlayStation store and at the weekend I finally got around to testing it. As it was daytime, and in an attempt to keep Poppy quiet for a few minutes, I opted to rent Disney-Pixar’s Cars in Standard Definition (no HD version available) – rental of this movie was only £2.49. The process was very easy, just select the movie, choose to rent or buy (£11.99 to buy???? too much money in my opinion) then click the download button. After a couple of minutes I got the option to ‘play while downloading’. I left it about 20 minutes to download 15% before I started to play it, just to make sure, but in all honesty I could have clicked play straight away with no issues. Download time on my 3Mbps broadband connection was estimated at 105 minutes, and the film itself was just short of 2 hours long. Poppy’s attention span lasted 45 minutes so it was all irrelevant anyway.

In other news with thanks to my dad for his assistance, I also managed to put the Christmas lights up outside the house which wasn’t as straight forward as I had first intended. Due to various cable slicing incidents this involved a fair amount of re-soldering wires.. but they are up at last. Last night we met Santa as well. He made his annual trip around the village in the back of a pick-up while being followed by every resident capable of walking, and some who weren’t in their electric mobility scooters. Afterwards there were mince pies, mulled wine, and a photo opportunity with Santa (pictures to follow at a later date…).

And in the final news of this blog post, I received the result from my latest Open University course (the hellish exam I took in October) and I passed with a better score than expected giving me (just) a pretty decent overall result for the course. Now… in theory, this means that I am eligible for graduation with a BSc Open degree, but I’m plowing on with one more year of courses (including the two that I’m taking at the moment which finish in a couple of weeks) to gain the final 60 points required to get a BSc (Hons) Open degree. Nearly there then, only almost 10 years after most of my peers!


Busy week for a geek

November 19th, 2009 No Comments »

They (who are they!?) say three buses will arrive all at once and they’re not wrong, this week is a busy one for persons of the technological persuasion. Firstly there’s Channel 4′s 3D TV week. In case you hadn’t noticed, Channel 4 have been broadcasting certain programs in 3D this week – the old red/blue glasses type of 3D. You can still pick up your free pair of 3D glasses from Sainsbury’s if you are quick and the schedule of programs continues this weekend with a ‘best of 3D’ program and a Hannah Montana concert. Check out Channel 4‘s web site for a full schedule. I’ve been recording all the programs ready to watch in a 3D marathon at some point in the future.

Next up we have the beta release of Microsoft Office 2010 – Microsoft’s newest version of their Office productivity suite available as an unfinished preview to those wishing to help Microsoft test it out before they sell it. So far, programs like Word and Excel don’t appear to have changed too much since their 2007 versions with the odd minor cosmetic difference here and there, but Outlook 2010 is muchos betteros especially when using the Outlook Live connector to link Outlook with your hotmail / live mail account. I can’t see Office 2010 being revolutionary if you own Office 2007 but the promise of Office 2010 Starter edition as a freebie for those just interested in the basic functionality of Word and Excel could tempt a lot of people. Even the “Home and Student” edition, Microsoft’s most popular version at the moment allowing up to 3 installations from a single (£99ish) purchase might suffer at the hands of the starter edition.

And finally….. we have an online movie rental service from Sony courtesy of the Playstation 3. I’ve not tested this out yet but there are over 800 movies ready to download either to rent or keep (prices from £2.49 for the sorts of films broadcast every few hours on ITV3+1 but it’s a start) with a number of recent blockbusters in too. I’ve been waiting for this service for a long time and there’ll be a full report once I’ve given it a run for it’s money. For those of you who haven’t got a clue what I’m on about, the idea is that using my Playstation 3 connected to my telly I can now browse a virtual store for a film I’d like to watch. I choose to either buy or rent the movie, and my Playstation 3 then downloads the film over the Internet for me to watch.