Good price, now I feel I paid too much. But hey, I have had 5 weeks use out of it already and now that it is performing as it should -ie not pixelating etc, I'm happy!
I originally had 80GB with 40GB free- had issues with pictures pixelating etc. I think it was cured more from reformatting my system (try using a new user name) than the new hard drive. you will get away with small HDD if you are willing to delete the stuff you are recording straight away. a 2 hour movie in HD will use about 10GB of space, so a larger HDD will give you heaps more space and you can watch it in your own time.
Has anybody reformatted their system using a new user name to see if this fixes the stuttering/pixelating problem without changing their hard drive?
Question for Bill9001 – In one of your posts you said “Last Monday, I installed a Samsung 640GB 5400rpm hard drive, and reinstalled all the data, now everything runs almost perfectly.” . Can you expand on the word “almost”? What didn’t get fixed? How much did the hard drive cost and where did you get it?
Answers for Ahmad
Might jump on one of these but I only have a 40Gb PS3. Due an upgrade to make PlayTV usable right? Because the recordings are in HD, they gobble heaps of space on your HDD, so I get about 4-5 hours of recordings on my 44GB of free space. I have original 80Gb drive and manage by watching and deleting asap. I’m considering increasing the size of my HDD if it isn’t too expensive.
Sorry I'm too lazy to read 30+ pages - can someone summarise what the problems with Play TV are for use in NZ (eg. lack of EPG on Prime and TV3)? Can’t help you.
And what workarounds are there (like changing to "Other" for location), and what problems does these workarounds in themselves create? Already covered.
And what's this about changing 1min skip to 10min??? Any way to avoid this update or is that what comes in the retail box?On the PS3 bluetooth remote, pressing the next button always skipped 1 minute, which means you could press it 4 times and jump past the adverts in a heart beat. After the last Sony auto software upgrade, the skip button now jumps 10 mins each time you press the next button. So now you have to press fast forward and watch carefully, rewinding when you go too far. This was fixed by going to “other” location but then you loose the 7 day EPG. It becomes a trade off, I’d rather have 7 day EPG than 1 minute skip, but I really miss the 1 minute skip feature.
It's just like Microsoft, you get advised of the update everytime you start up PlayTV and you don't know what subtle changes come with it. So you can ignore the update message if you wish, but not sure if you can do this forever.
So the disc that came with my PlayTV - is that the old soft/firmware? Or do I have to download soft/firmware from the net and therefore pick up the latest version?
Depends what version shipped with your PlayTV firmware? I got mine 12 months ago and had to update to the latest version to get it to work in NZ. BTW the updates overall are an improvement. For instance it is now capable of 3D picture (this was free) and if you are a gamer this must be huge, it is now smarter when recording programs which overlap. The only peeve in the last release was changing the skip button.
PlayTVuser: Has anybody reformatted their system using a new user name to see if this fixes the stuttering/pixelating problem without changing their hard drive?
Question for Bill9001 – In one of your posts you said “Last Monday, I installed a Samsung 640GB 5400rpm hard drive, and reinstalled all the data, now everything runs almost perfectly.” . Can you expand on the word “almost”? What didn’t get fixed? How much did the hard drive cost and where did you get it?
Well now it runs perfectly, although Prime doesn't seem to be as strong as on my builtin Freeview TV.
I got the Samsung Harddrive through a mate who works in IT so I got it at trade price. Just googled it and here is the same drive (I actually paid more than that for it
elive dot co dot nz are advertising Samsung 640GB Spinpoint M7E 5400rpm Mobile Hard Drive, SATA II, 8MB
Discount Cash Price if you pay through Direct Deposit, Internet Banking or Cheque.
You Save 15% SRRP: $199.00 $168.20 incl gst Credit Card: $174.09 incl gst
You installed http://www.elive.co.nz/samsung-640gb-spinpoint-m7e-drive-ac1306.php
According to one article I found, the PS3 has these drives installed http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_momentus5400.2_120gb.pdf
Looks like they both have the same internal buffer of 8MB (not sure whether PS3 has DRAM and what speed) but putting that to one side, look at the transfer rate difference. PS3 = 150m/s Your Samsung = 300m/s
I'm no IT expert, on hard drives, but this is the only obvious difference I can see.
When I'm back home from holiday I'll look into re-formatting and rebuild my 80Gb drive to see if this resolves the problem.
Yeah standard PS3 drive has 8MB buffer so no difference there, and is a 5400rpm unit from memory so a faster drive 'may' help.
I've done the full format (took days) and it didn't improve anything. I believe some drives just aren't suited for the PlayTV software for some reason. I had a 500GB Western Digital Blue drive and had serious stuttering so I sold PlayTV. Tried most everything else and nothing worked. Had 100% signal strength and even tried reducing this with a variable attentuator etc.
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