With all of the games flying onto the shelves of your favorite video game retailer, you may have missed the fact that the 2.5 version of the PS3 firmware is just around the corner. Seems that SCEE has let it be known that the European PS3 fans can expect this little treasure on October 15, which by the time you’re reading this will already have occurred. Hopefully those of us state-side will be giddy with a release on the same day. Why is this such a big deal? Well, in case you’ve been living under a rock, or a deluge of games to play, some of the more prominent features include in-game screenshots, High-Quality mode for the official Sony Bluetooth headset, and automatic power-off after download/install or inactivity. Oh and one more little thing.

Via Joystiq.

The PS3 web browser is getting Flash 9 support. For those of you scratching your head at the last one, let me give you four reasons why this is big news for PS3: H U L U. For those not keeping up on the latest happenings around the Inter-tubes, Hulu is a website for streaming on-demand video. Now while this doesn’t sound all that original, it’s because the concept has been done before but for different content. Hulu brings full free TV shows and movies and streams them in decent quality, including “HD”. I use the term HD loosely here because some of its 480p, some of its 720p, and I haven’t seen 1080(i or p) or heard 5.1 audio yet. Now the streams are ad-supported, but the advertisements are short and few and far-between. Something I willing to put up with to have on-demand video streamed to my TV.

See I love using my PS3 as media center for my TV. Previously I had to lug my PC over to the TV to be able to watch streaming content. This wasn’t too bad except my PC isn’t small, starting age and gets used for other things like playing games, and browsing the web. After the purchase of the PS3 it was able to fill most of these roles except all of the streaming media content. In the past the content providers liked to have their own proprietary streaming formats and this limited the ability for anything but a Windows PC to be able to view the content. Along came software like PlayOn which filled this gap by transcoding the media to formats usable by devices like our PS3’s and Xbox360’s. I’ve been beta-testing PlayOn using its free 60-day trial to view said media on my PS3. And, I’ve loved it. It’s great being able to flip on Simpsons, Family Guy, The Tick, and a variety of different movies all from the comfort of my couch.

Since Sony has now brought the foundation that enables this content to the PS3, I’m eagerly hoping that I will be able to natively view it on the PS3. There are of course some problems that could limit the full capability of the PS3 Flash 9 support. In previous versions of the PS3 web browser, there were problems with viewing webpages full of “too much” content. I know I’ve experienced issues where I had to tell it not to load the plug-in for various embedded media/ad’s to be able to view a webpage without “Out of Memory” errors. Hopefully, the support for Flash 9 alleviates some of these headaches and all of us PS3 owners will be able to enjoy this latest Internet phenomenon. Once the firmware drops, I will follow up with a report on the capability. Still, it’s nice to see value still being added in new features, and I will whole-heartedly welcome it. Now excuse me while I return back to my pile of games waiting for me, until the new firmware is available.