The necessity of good firmware support

Video Asylum

TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Home Theater systems and more.

In this age of changing specs and of formats constantly coming and going, software/firmware support is essential. Most companies do not do a good job of providing it. For example, my Tivo Series 3, which is supposed to deliver HD broadcasts in their native resolution, is now worthless. When I try to feed it high def broadcasts, it hangs, shows bad compression artifacts and then goes dead. It often has problems with standard definition broadcasts, although I can usually get it working. I have made Tivo aware of the problem and was promised the issue would be escalated to their engineers. Supposedly new software will be uploaded to my Tivo, but so far nothing. I'm not holding my breath. Meanwhile watching TV has become a PITA and I've simply given up watching HDTV broadcasts altogether as it bombs my Tivo.

On the other end of the spectrum, Sony's software/firmware support of the PS3 is absolutely phenomenal. Before I even cared about whether the PS3 was Blu-ray 1.1 or 2.0 compliant, Sony had upgraded the PS3 to be a 2.0 BD player. The only outstanding issue is DTS-HD MA decoding and now it looks like Sony will offer a firmware update on April 15 that does exactly that! I couldn't ask for better support or a more future-proof BD player. I still don't much care about the picture-in-picture or online features, but the lack of DTS-HD MA support was starting to bother me because it was being used on more titles. But as of next week, the PS3 will be able to handle all BD content that any studio throws at it--including all the high bitrate audio formats. I couldn't be happier.
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Call it, friendo.

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Topic - The necessity of good firmware support - Jazz Inmate 13:20:51 04/10/08 (10)

Is that REALLY better than building it right the first time? - Jack G 05:50:08 04/11/08 (5)

Building implies hardware engineering. I'm talking about software/firmware engineering NT - Jazz Inmate 14:43:56 04/11/08 (4)

Nonsense the same applies to software issues.(nt) - Jack G 16:06:39 04/11/08 (3)

Now you're implying that technology remains static - Jazz Inmate 18:47:48 04/11/08 (2)

Bad analogy - Jack G 06:15:17 04/12/08 (1)

No, it's a good analogy because the hardware is not the problem - Jazz Inmate 21:48:55 04/12/08 (0)

Thanks - late 13:58:08 04/10/08 (0)

Looking Foward To The Firmware - Robertc88 13:45:12 04/10/08 (1)

I can't wait for GTA4 at the end of the month - Jazz Inmate 17:03:39 04/10/08 (0)

Looking Foward To The Firmware - Robertc88 13:44:37 04/10/08 (0)

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