Thoughts on Interaction Design

I bought a PS3 just when it came out last year. It is a really nice console and one of the things that really interest me is using it to play my movies. The interface is very media oriented as it shows ‘video’, ‘pictures’ and ‘music’ prominently in the main menu. I don’t really care much for the pictures and music menus though. I have my pictures on Picasaweb and my music is in iTunes. Why would I copy all of those to the PS3? Unless a future firmware update will allow me to connect to iTunes or to online photo galleries I guess I would never really start using it. Anyway, being able to play my movies is very useful and cool for me!

One very interesting feature that was delivered in the latest firmware update for the PS3 is the ability to play DivX movies. Great! Now I don’t have to re-code all my movies to MP4 anymore, since that was the only format it would play up until now. So now I can happily use the PS3 to what all my movies on my television. A media center should aways provide support for the most common formats per media type. I never understood why Sony only supported MP4 which is not very common yet. Nonetheless, even with DivX support there is still a lot of other stuff to improve in order to make the user experience really good. Here’s a couple of them.

Managing content

In order to get a movie or any other type of media item on the PS3 you have basically three options:

1. Burn the file on a DVD and copy if from the DVD to the local harddrive.
2. Copy it onto a Flash memory card/stick and copy it from there.
3. Put the file on your own web server and download it from there using the PS3’s web browser.
4. Install a UPnP server on your computer and stream (or copy) it using the ‘Media Server’ function.

Now, option 1 will waste a DVD, option 2 is a hassle and option 3 requires you to be a nerd. Option 4 is by far the easiest one except for the fact that you first have to install a UPnP server that works well with the PS3 (e.g. MediaLink or TVersity). Once installed, you’ll simply see your files appear under the ‘Media Server’ link automatically. Voila, zero interaction required!

Why is there no standard easy way to get media files on the PS3? A very important element of the success of the iPod is the fact that it is so easy to manage your collection of songs and get them on the iPod. Apple treats the Apple TV in the same way it treats the iPod and hence getting files on the Apple TV is really easy. Why doesn’t Sony distribute a very simple application that allows you to manage your media and send files to the PS3? I think most people will not be able to put files on the PS3 unless Sony supplies a simple media management application. Simply say which files and folders should be synced to the PS3 and hit the sync button. And while you’re at it Sony, please include a free UPnP server for all our streaming needs!

Subtitles

Anyone who watches movies a lot knows that subtitles are very important. Yet, you can guess by now, the PS3 doesn’t support subtitles at all! We Europeans love to watch a Spanish, German, Italian or even Russian movies but we really need the subtitles to understand the movies. There are several simple subtitle formats out there such .srt or .sub which any decent PC media player will play nowadays. But the PS3 won’t play any of them and therefore I can only whatch movies on my PS3 that I can understand well without subtitles, basically just Dutch and English movies in my case. I guess we’ll have to wait for another firmware update from Sony…

‘Skimming’

An other thing the PS3 is lacking is skimming. I am not sure ’skimming’ is the right word but what I mean is the ability to step through an entire 2 hour movie in just a couple of key presses. The Apple TV does this when you use the left or right arrow buttons. It skips about 10% of the entire movie with each click. So if you want to go to a specific spot in the movie, you can get near to the point in just a few clicks and then fast forward to the exact position. The PS3 does not offer such functionality so the only thing you can do is simply fast forward all the way to the desired position.What makes this even worse is that fast forwarding just doesn’t work when streaming a movie from a media server. UPnP is not supporting this very well. Again, on the Apple TV it works like a charm when streaming movies from iTunes!

So although my media experience has improved now that I can play my DivX movies and I have a good UPnP for my mac, there are still some aspects to be approved. Let’s see what the upcoming PS3 updates will bring us!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Media consumption. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.