The PS3, movies, and utter frustration

Earlier this month, Sony released an update for the PS3 which Penny Arcade justifiably skewered.  The primary benefit of this update was that it brought text chat to this game-playing-Blu-Ray-churning-center-of-your-connected-home beast of a system.

Yes, text chat.  A feature that stopped being cutting edge fifteen years ago — and at least fifteen years ago we were using full keyboards, rather than the screen-based abortive hack of an interface that passes for an input means on the PS3.  In spite of this, we PlayStation faithful downloaded this used band-aid of a software update like so many piglets at the proverbial teat, and nobly installed it.  We knew that we could never return to the glory days of yore when we didn’t have the ability to awkwardly shuffle text messages to each other, but then why would one ever want to look back?

I have now an answer to that question.

I was willing to overlook the half-baked lameness of this update.  I was puzzled, but not bothered, by the rabid nature of the comments on Sony’s blog that heralded this as the greatest technological progression since we first trod on the moon.  I accepted this update as progress, even if it was progress that afforded me absolutely no benefit.  I was okay with all of this — until I learned that this update actually completely broke the media streaming functionality of our PS3.

You see, shortly after installing said patch, Elizabeth, Diggory and I decided to watch a movie.  We fired up the PS3, connected to Diggory’s PC-cum-server over our home network, and called forth a movie from the depths of the archives there.

The movie did not come forth willingly.  It was jittery, it was pixelated, it was slow, and it was a big, blocky mess.  Trying to fast-forward or rewind brought the system buckling to its knees.  “This is not ideal,” I commented mildly, shortly before giving up entirely on the film and moving on to the next.  When other movies yielded the same result, though, I began to suspect that something was up.

It says something that the PS3 was the one device in all of this that I did not suspect.  Perhaps it was the ethernet cable we ran to Diggory’s room, I ventured.  Perhaps one of our routers was glitched.  Perhaps Diggory’s PC has become so intensely focused on folding that it can no longer be bothered to share with us the movies it holds in the shadowy recesses of its memory.  Perhaps everyone just needs a quick reboot and some time to think, and all will be well.  I laid out a five-stage plan to tear down the home network, piece by piece, and test it at each and every point to find out what was standing between me and my consumption of video entertainment.

Diggory suggested, almost in passing, that maybe he could bring his PS3 upstairs and we could see if it experienced the same issues.  A quick test, we figured, which involved minimal unplugging of cables and locomotion of hardware, so we might as well try it out.  Up came Diggory’s system, still sweating from its day of folding proteins.  Thirty seconds later, it was connected to the network and streaming video like a champ.

I’ll skip over much of our troubleshooting and discussion, with its corresponding commentary on the state of technology and cultural development, and get to the point where we realized that the only difference between my PS3 and Diggory’s was that he had not yet installed the aforementioned update.  A quick search on Google confirmed our fears: update 2.70 trashed the media streaming capabilities.

At this point, the facts of the situation presented themselves to me like a hammer formed of concentrated light lodging itself in my cranium.  I had accepted an update that provided to me a meaningless feature I will never, ever use, and in return I had traded away the primary function for which our PS3 resides in our house.  What type of Mephistophelian exchange was this, I cried to the shiny black brick inhabiting the space beside our TV.  The echoing silence told me all I needed to know.

My point (if I have one) is to Sony, and it is threefold.  First, if you are going to foist software on a trusting and cash-bearing public, kindly test it before you do so.  Second, if you are going to compell us to install updates, might I ask you to make them worth our while?  And third (assuming you ignore one and two, which I’m fairly certain you will), if you do continue ramming pointless updates down our throats, at least for the love of all that’s holy do not break the very functionality that keeps our wives from just selling the damn thing on eBay.

photo credit: shagy6six6