Playstation 3 as Blu-Ray player.

[platespiller]

Pfslai, I tried a couple of PAL DVDs, no luck.

It says, "PAL is not supported" Maybe there's a hack out there?

On another tangent, I sent my PS3 to Sony due to its loud fan noise.
Got it back a week later, still just as noisy. Tried one of those aftermarket clip on fan deals at CC, even louder.
No more blu-ray movies for me. The improved picture is not worth the racket.

[kennyt]

JDevine760,

I must comment....

I agree scaled SD DVD's can look pretty good, but if your set does 1080p, and I suspect yours does (could be wrong here) you only need compare an SD DVD scaled to a Blu-ra (or HD DVD but as we are speaking of PS3) to see the difference, it is HUGE! I have both the SD DVD and Blu-ray of "Pirates of the Caribbean Dead Mans Chest" and have used these to demo high def discs to several friends on both the Samsung BDP-1200 and Sony BDP-S1, both very good Blu-ray players.

Well, even my 'sit and wait out the format war' friends ended up buying a Blu-ray player after seeing this demo, it is night and day how much better the picture is, and it should be easily appparent to you if you do a similar demo.

Try it for yourself, I am sure you will agree!

Ken

[JDevine760]

Ken,
The key word in my posting was "almost"...I'm fully aware that nothing compares completely to a fine Blu-Ray disc...I have dozens of them already (and yes I've done the a/b comparison with an sd disc...but my point was that the quality of an sd disc played on the PS3 is so much better than it is on ANY upscaling dvd player (and I have several of those)...that I was blown away. THat's all... I'm certainly not telling people not to go with High Def...once you've seen it is hard to go back...but the PS3 makes it a lot less painful to view your entire old collection of sd dvds (of which I have nearly 5000! Didn't want to redo that library I can tell you!!!!

John Devine

[tomsavini]

Originally Posted by JDevine760

I couldn't disagree more about the PS3 as a DVD player...when I put dvds in this machine and play them on my SONY LCOS 50"er the picture is SOOooo good it makes you question the need for High Def discs at all...it is THAT good. Astonishing in fact! A statement with which my guests watching all agree...this includes DVDs copied from broadcast high def and recorded (via SVideo cable believe it or not) to high speed regular DVD...it is almost hard to tell them from the original high def broadcast!!
Way to go PS3...no wonder Sony was losing about $300 on each machine!

Have you ever compared a Blu-Ray movie with a DVD on the PS3?
You might be suprised

[jchunter]

Originally Posted by platespiller

Pfslai, I tried a couple of PAL DVDs, no luck.

It says, "PAL is not supported" Maybe there's a hack out there?

The "PAL is not supported" error message is misleading at best as the PS3 plays my PAL MPEG2 files copied to DVD without any problems. However, if I try playing a Region 2 DVD it displays "PAL is not supported". What it really means is that it's perfectly capable of playing PAL, but it will not permit playing DVDs unless they're Region 1, at least until someone figures out a region-free fix.

[AudAdv]

Originally Posted by jchunter

The "PAL is not supported" error message is misleading at best as the PS3 plays my PAL MPEG2 files copied to DVD without any problems. However, if I try playing a Region 2 DVD it displays "PAL is not supported". What it really means is that it's perfectly capable of playing PAL, but it will not permit playing DVDs unless they're Region 1, at least until someone figures out a region-free fix.

The region-free fix is called "DVD shrink". Just re-author your PAL discs without a region code in that program and burn them to a DVD-R. It's time consuming, but will be the best possible picture quality.

If your movie is over 4.7GB, be sure to buy a dual-layer DVD-R if you want maximum video quality. Otherwise, DVD Shrink can certainly compress it to fit on a standard 4.7GB DVD-R, but a bit of quality will be lost.

I have never tried to play any PAL source through a PS3, but if you're sure it will work, then DVD Shrink will cure your region code problems.