Europe's PS3 PlayTV records TV with no DRM

If they had sold these in the U.S. I'd buy a PS3 and this ASAP. I'm guessing these are incompatible with U.S. and other regions because of PAL vs. NTSC or something.

This should move alot of PlayTV's. Look at the PS3 at launch and look at it now, it sure is refreshing to know that every year the PS3 will have more and more functionality which makes it more appealing and gives it even greater value.

Now, pretty please bring this to N.A.

FOOTBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLL....is back!!!
FANTASY FOOTBALLLLL!!!

I suppose it'll get botched now that everyone's blabbing about it.

Why would Sony ADD DRM to content which is broadcast over the air for free and which it does not own?

Whoever made up this stupid rumour deserves to be not in the business of making up rumours any more.

even if i can't use it i want that device. i think that box would look cool in my set up.

Circumventing DRM the new 'stealing cable'.

I gotta say, this aint really news for any of us euros, the whole DVB-T thing has been around for a few years now, there are plenty of pc cards to record digital telly without your so-called "drm". One of the main points when PlayTV was first announced was the ability to playback stuff on the psp with remoteplay, so how would the drm work there?

I dunno, slow news day?

thats awesome, wish i could get one.

Its not a hole, you gimps, its just an end to nothing but stories based on rumours.

The whole "oh noes! Now PlayTV it getting DRM'd!!" stories that flew about never seemed like anything more than a self-created blog storm.
Why would Sony attach DRM to free-to-air TV, that they have no content-interest in, that flies all over Europe, even on mobile phones?

I was very excited intially for this, but the lack of DVB-T2 support (coming to the UK in 2009) and the fact that it won't turn your PS3 on to start recording put me off.

I'm guessing the latter will be fixable via a firmware update? But with the coming HD broadcasts I'll hold off until they revise the hardware.

It's because it's competitors already do this.

This doesn't sound like a hole. I think this whole thing is overblown. Sony canceled the ability to move videos around easy just because they couldn't get the UI elements needed to do it done in time. No reason to think the raw capabilities wouldn't still be there.

The reason the 360 HD-DVD drive is good for copying is not because of the component outputs. All HD-DVD and BluRay players have component outputs. The reason is because with a little work you could get access to the original (still compressed) digital data off the HD-DVD. This is a lot more convenient, as capturing in HD from component and compressing well takes a lot of hardware and storage. If you can just grab it still compressed, it gets far easier.

Note you can also extract the original (still compressed) digital data off of HD-DVDs using other HD-DVD drives and can do so off BluRay discs using computer internal BluRay drives.

damn; sounds all kinds of illegal...

When this device is released there's bound to be an increase of torrent MP4 TV shows and movies available. Some of the DVB-T broadcasts in the UK are heavily compressed, to make room for loads of QVC type channels. In particular Five Life and Five US can be a little dodgy (loads of compression artefacts).

When I get my 80GB PS3 I will probably buy this, might wait for a bit of a price drop though. My stand alone PVR records at 2GB per hour, I'm guessing the PlayTV may have different quality settings to make the most of the PS3s HDD, perhaps a PSP mode at 480x272.