PlayStation 3 vs Philip 5990/37

[reg505]

I have a Philip 5990/37 and I am really happy with. It plays everything but Blu-Ray. I tempted by a PlayStation 3 for Christmas (and my son too!) but I would like to know the following:

- Can the PS3 play DivX/xvid movies from the USB port (USB stick or USB disk) and can it play DivX/xvid movies from the internal hard disk?

- Does the PS3 support .srt subtitles? This is an important feauture as I would not like to encode the subtitles myself.

- Is it region free or is there a patch to make it region free for both Blu-ray and DVD movies?

- Does the PS3 capable of 1080p Upscaling for normal DVD?

Thank you all

[jman98]

- Is it region free or is there a patch to make it region free for both Blu-ray and DVD movies?

It is NOT region free for any DVD or BluRay playback. There are no patches for this. In the past it was possible to do this via mod chips, but the PS3 has mandatory firmware upgrades from time to time and if someone ever designed a chip that could bypass region locking, Sony could simply impose an update that breaks it. Note that there is some evidence that the PS3 is NOT a converting DVD player, which means that if you play PAL DVDs on it you will need a TV capable of PAL display. I am not totally sure about this point though.

- Does the PS3 capable of 1080p Upscaling for normal DVD?

Yes, but everyone acts like they are just totally screwed without this feature and that's not necessarily true. In fact, if you have a good HDTV it may actually upscale better than the PS3. People say that the PS3's upscaler is good though, but again, even if it didn't have one that's not necessarily a big deal.

I do not own a PS3 and cannot answer your first 2 questions.

[porfitron]

- Can the PS3 play DivX/xvid movies from the USB port (USB stick or USB disk) and can it play DivX/xvid movies from the internal hard disk?

Yes, the PS3 reads the DivX/AVI videos from a specific directory on a USB drive. I believe it's :\PS3\VIDEO
When you have the USB inserted, you can select the file and play it directly, or choose "copy to..." which will let you copy it to the Playstation's hard drive.

- Does the PS3 support .srt subtitles? This is an important feauture as I would not like to encode the subtitles myself.

Because the PS3 is a DivX certified device, it can display SRT subtitles, but they have to be muxed into the file. You can quickly and easily do this with the free DivX Mux GUI tool available here:
http://labs.divx.com/DivXMuxGUI

Just choose your video source, audio source (which is just the video source again), and your SRT subtitle source, and then DivX Mux GUI will output a new video file with a .divx extension. Then, when you play it in the PS3, you just turn on the subtitles... I just tested this out for someone in the handbrake forums last week and it worked perfect, and muxing is always nice because it doesn't touch/affect the video quality since it's just passed to the new container.

[reg505]

Thanks to both of you for this helpful information.

I tried DivX Mux gui tool with several avi/srt but it always fails and no error messages are produced by the tool. The original avi file is about 350 MB and DivXMux stops after it creates a divx file of around 40 MB. The last message I see in the command line window is "Creating Index". The same avi/srt plays just fine on my Philips dvd player. Any ideas?

[Ai Haibara]

You might give AVIAddXSubs a try, too.

[reg505]

Thanks a bunch for the hint about AVIAddXSubs. It works like a charm!