The Playstation 3 as a Computer
So over the weekend I had some time to play around with my PS3 at last.
The GameOS, naturally, sucks. The web browser sucks. The photo viewer cannot play animated GIFs nor open PNGs in 5000×8000 resolution (I’d expect it to at least be flexible about that), the audio player does not recognize ID3v2/APEv2 tags in M4A/MP4 AAC files and insists on upsampling my 44.1kHz tracks to 48kHz if I want to do anything else on the XMB while listening to music, AND cannot group music files by directory, the video player doesn’t recognize SRT subtitles inside MP4 video files, not to mention it has very limited codec support. Vorbis? FLAC? Proper H.264 support that doesn’t require me to reencode most of my movie collection? Where’s MKV? Have they still not fixed this yet after 3 years?
So I hastily backuped, reformatted and installed Yellow Dog Linux 6.2. At this point I hit another major pitfall. They still only allow you to choose 10GB for the OtherOS or 10GB for the GameOS. Obviously, the 10GB for the GameOS is totally unacceptable, the major reason being that Valkyria Chronicles, which I played the LIVING HELL out of, takes up 3GBs. But seriously, can’t they even let me choose what size I want to split the disk up in?
Whatever. I install YDL. YDL 6.2 by default is fucking stupid, it installs 2GB of worthless shit I don’t need (500MB GNOME+KDE) on a system that lets you either have 10GB for Linux or for the GameOS. Seriously, couldn’t they trim it down a little? Who the fuck uses GNOME/KDE on a system with only 256MB RAM+224MB ps3vram swap anyway? So I wrapped my head around yum and got some extra repositories up and running. Lo and behold, mplayer on the PS3! Time to play all my MKV and AVI and FLAC/Vorbis/M4A with proper tag support and… no, wait, no, there’s a problem here. Oh damn, I should have known. There’s no 2D graphics hardware acceleration, so everything is done by the in-order 3.2GHz PPE. And the rest of the 6 SPEs, where the PS3’s bulk computing power lies, are sleeping. Idle. Dormant. GREAT. As a result, the PPE spends most of its time performing colorspace conversion and can’t even play a 720p H.264 file smoothly. What’s worse, it doesn’t even stretch the video fullscreen, obviously because it’s just a framebuffer and there’s no 2D accel/XVideo support for it.
It seems I have to download lots of weird SPE libraries and then patch the latest mplayer source with mplayer-ps3 which makes the SPEs do the colorspace conversion and then allows the video to be output via -vo ps3. Then another SPE will kick in and resize the output into whatever size I want the window to be. Decoding is still handled by the PPE. What’s more, there’s no guarantee that it works.
And you’d expect that since it’s Linux, you would be able to run X11 at some PC resolution, like 1680×1050. NOOOOO, it only supports 720p and 1080p. Bullshit. You know what? I think Sony isn’t really serious about this computing thing. They even stripped it out from the PS3 Slim, so you can clearly see where their heart lies. A little 2D accel never hurt anybody. They’re just in it for the publicity. And now that enough publicity has been garnered, they take it away.
I still love my PS3, in case you’re wondering. It does play nice with all your hardware, like FAT32 formatted partitions, USB keyboards+mice, and even third party USB gamepads. Hell, it even rips CDs for you, something I wouldn’t expect from Sony. Plus, Persona 4 and Valkyria Chronicles = major win. I’ll buy GTA4 for it next.
