Thursday 11 June 2009

VidZone is awesome - it's official!

After a shaky start start with connection problems for most people due to high demand, VidZone seems to be working fine now and I'm really liking what I've seen so far.

It's very intuitive to use and navigation is similar to that of the PlayStation store (although the interface doesn't look quite as slick). Playlists are easy enough to set up or you can use a recommended one. I jumped straight into the music by selecting Playlists -> recommended -> Ibiza Party Videos (a winning combination of cheesy dance music, and scantily-clad hot women :)).

Controls are displayed on screen - press select for full screen for example (although truth be told I've not actually seen full screen - if the video is shot in widescreen, I get a black border around it on my 16:9 TV. If it's shot in "full screen" I get black bars to the left and right). Video quality is quite good and seems to vary from video to video - some look slightly worse than standard definition and some look a bit better. Audio quality is good too - seems comparable to what you would get on iTunes (the original 128kbps AAC tracks). I've seen no lag or jitter whatsoever on playback and I'm not on a particularly fast connection - around 2 megabit. If I manually skip between tracks in the playlist it takes a second or two to play the next track but I would expect that due to the nature of streaming media. Without skipping, the transition between tracks in the playlist is seamless. There's a huge selection of videos available as we were promised.

So all in all I'm really impressed and I think that SCEE should feel proud that they've managed to pull this off. I've tinkered with Sony's other "ventures" for PS3 - Home and Life with PlayStation for example. Both of those have just been a novelty to me and I haven't used either of them in months. VidZone I can see myself using regularly and in place of the music channels that I watch on Freeview. Here's hoping that Sony keep it well-stocked with up-to-date content.
[reakt]

9 comments:

  1. Mine works well - apart from - NO SOUND! No idea why, very odd indeed.

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  2. no sound ... is that anything to do with you watching some of the more *cough* exotic videos ;)

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  3. gotta agree reakt, some quality choons on there, including a pablo fav - I left my wallet in el segundo by tribe called quest.

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  4. i gave up trying to get it to work and went off trolling on the internets instead :) will have a look later today if i can bare looking at that sodding portable tv again.

    better start looking like i'm doing some actual 'work' you know instead of just stealing the companies bandwidth *whistles innocently* *wanders off to coffee machine*

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  5. Does it do anything that youtube doesn't?

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  6. @Mittens
    Personally I think it's better than YouTube for these reasons:
    They make it easy to create playlists; they guarantee that all videos are complete and of a good quality; they don't delete videos for copyright infringement.

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  7. @Jimmy - try this fix for your no sound problem...
    http://community.eu.playstation.com/playstationeu/board/message?board.id=417&message.id=43038

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  8. got VidZone loaded up, pretty cool, the search is a bit weak and listing artists with no tracks either.. hmmm.. impressed with the quality of the vids, better than i expected. Oh and Weird Al's 'close but no cigar' class tune :)

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  9. and what's with the borders in 'full screen' mode?

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