Sony PlayStation 4 to get Blu-ray 3D support ‘soon’

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe said that the PlayStation 4 video game console will “soon” be able to playback Blu-ray 3D movies. The move will automatically make the console one of the most popular BD-3D players, but will it help the standard to become more popular?

“Coming soon: PS4 system software update 1.75 adds 3D Blu-ray film support,” said SCEE is a post on Twitter.

Since Sony’s PlayStation 4 is based on a high-performance custom system-on-chip from AMD with eight x86 “Jaguar” cores, an advanced Radeon graphics processing engine powered by the GCN [graphics core next] architecture and a bunch of media playback accelerators, technically it can playback and display virtually all types of content.

Two key things required for BD-3D playback are MPEG4-MVC decoder as well as 2x Blu-ray disc drive, since the console was designed with 4K video in mind, it can definitely decode MPEG4-MVC, besides, it features 6x BD drive. The console also has custom HDMI connector that was developed to support 4K video output.

While everything is perfect with PS4’s hardware, Sony shipped the console without BD-3D playback capability. Fortunately, this is going to be fixed with the version 1.75 software update for the console.

It is estimated that by now Sony has sold over eight million PlayStation 4 video game systems, which means that the console will be one of the most popular Blu-ray 3D players on the market. Unfortunately, it does not look like there is a lot of interest for stereo-3D in general and Blu-ray 3D in particular. Not all people have S3D HDTVs and many are already interested in 4K (3840*2160) ultra-high-definition TV-sets and movies, hence, the interest towards the BD-3D technology is probably fading.

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KitGuru Says: At last, an important function of the PS4 will be unlocked. It will be interesting to see whether there are other capabilities that could be added by a software update…

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