* Since the standards for BD-ROM such as BDMV and BD-J were delayed, particular player functions were developed later while 2 years has already passed for the development of software decoding function for codecs such as H.264.
* H.264 decoding itself was not very difficult for Cell with moderate optimization and they could play a movie in realtime at the first try unlike very difficult SACD optimization. However, because they began the development without knowing the final Blu-ray standard, they set the goal very high for decoding 2 full HD H.264 streams at 40Mbps simultaneously. Besides the clockspeed of the devkit was lower than the final product which made the development difficult. The current decoder can decode full HD H.264 with 3 SPEs.
* The current BD/DVD player for the PS3 does internal pixel processing at 16-bit per RGB. (The output depends on the display color depth.) Though the 1.0 firmware was 8-bit per RGB, Kutaragi ordered the change of the design at the final product review and it was upgraded to 16-bit in the 1.1 firmware.
* It's still not enough for TV and theater projectors that can display the original YCrCb stored in BD and DVD. For example the current PS3 player lacks gradation in brighter and darker parts of pictures when compared to Panasonic DMP-BD10. The reason why the internal processing is done in RGB is because RSX can't have 2 color spaces at the same time. Honda suspects they used RGB for the player because in the prototype design they planned to overlay XMB in RGB onto the picture of BD/DVD. In the final design XMB is not overlayed onto the player.
* Actually Kutaragi also ordered the development of the version with YCrCb internal processing at the final review. In the firmware version released in December it becomes possible for a user to choose RGB or YCrCb.
* The current player converts interlace to progressive only for SD movies. Right now SCE developers are working to improve DVD picture quality after they implemented YCrCb. After that it's planned to do something for 1080i to 1080p conversion. Though the RAM size can be an obstacle for it, SCE developers say they can do it by splitting the load between Cell and RSX.
* Currently there are complaints from users about non-existent DVD upscaling in the PS3. As for the interlace-to-progressive before upscaling, the current player has it already. There was a team at the division for broadcast equipments at Sony that does research for improving image quality by using the NVIDIA shader language. They ported it onto RSX. After Cell does noise reduction and other filters, RSX does interlace-to-progressive conversion. Though the current algorithm has bugs for some video sources, SCE says the conversion precision will be upgraded by future updates. Also the noise reduction filter is currently optimized for video sources with relatively many MPEG noises recorded with a video recorder. SCE knows lack of picture details because of it and will provide new default values for noise reduction by checking recording formats and media IDs for DVD discs. As for upscaling, they are doing the research to develop a high-quality multi-tap upscaling filter that balances the load between Cell and RSX. They also plan to use the non-original luminance information generated in upscaling for HDMI 1.3 deep color.
* Currently it's known that the audio quality of DTS is especially good compared to other audio codecs as heard in playing 480p DVD via HDMI with more bandwidth for the audio. SCE don't know the definitive reason. They just ported the reference source code provided by DTS with as high precision as possible.
* An SCE developer recommends trying 1.5x fast-forward playback in the PS3 BD player to see the power of Cell. When it's connected to a display via 1080/60p, it becomes very smooth as Cell has an enough margin for video decoding. In 1.5x fast-forward playback it decodes all frames then inserts them into 60fps with sped up audio.
* SCE declared that they'd support 1080/24p in the PS3.
