Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Media playback is something the PS3 and Xbox 360 are pretty good at and with a little help from the likes of something like TVersity it can allegedly work even better. It looks like both consoles will be getting DivX playback, but I’m first in line to tell both Sony and Microsoft that it’s not good enough.

TVersity’s big promise is to be able to play any content anywhere, or so the slogan goes, and their list of devices they support is truly impressive, from lowly set-top boxes to PSPs, PS3′s, even iPhones. All of this support works pretty much OK if your device can play the native file format, but if you want to “transcode” or on-the-fly convert audio or video formats for your device get ready for a wild ride. While I found the ability to stream PS3-supported music and video file types from my desktop directly to the console to work well, I found its enticing transcoding feature to be impossible to configure. It relies on a tangled mess of external codecs that can and will overwrite each others settings and may require deep dives into the registry to get working, and the documentation to get it running was a nonstop string of maybe-it’s-this or maybe-it’s-that finger-pointing. So I gave up on it. If I want it on my PS3 I don’t want to have to run my PC anyway, so I’ll transfer it over via thumbdrive or flash card.

Anyway, a new press release from the DivX software company today reveals that the PS3 has DivX file format support coming to end-users in a future firmware update while developers will have access to it in a new 2.00 SDK.

The Xbox 360 isn’t being left out either, with recent a financial conference call with the DivX software company also showing that they’re in talks with Microsoft to bring support for that file format to the console.

DivX is all well and good for content providers, but as a home user I don’t care about it. I’m not going to pay for the DivX encoder, which is commercial software, when I can get similar quality from the open-source, cross-platform XviD format. I started re-encoding all of my home movies from AVI into XviD to save ridiculous amounts of space quite a while back and it would be nice to not have to convert them to MPEG-2 to play them on my PS3.

And while I’m complaining about file formats, why on Earth doesn’t the PS3 have Ogg file format support? The Vorbis audio and Theora video file formats along with the OGM container format are completely free as in zero dollars and free as in non-patented. The wise developers from Sony already support the completely patent-free PNG image format, so they know such things exist. It plays the patented MP3 and MPEG-2 file formats, the console will even rip audio CDs to MP3s for you, and nobody is selling anything audio or video via the PS3 yet anyway, so can someone explain to me why I can’t get those other file formats?