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While I'm on the subject of media watching, let us not forget that you don't need a disc in the drive to play films on the PS3. As with the Xbox, hard drive space can be used for storing music and video to watch at will. Media can also be streamed from a USB storage device or from a networked PC. While the standard drive capacity isn't that bad, at 40GB or 60GB in the UK depending on which console you own, I would recommend you partake in the very simple upgrade process and use a decent sized hard drive. A word to the wise though, not any 2.5in drive will fit as the internal bay isn't high enough. At the moment that basically means don't buy a 300GB drive as it won't go in, try a 250GB model instead. You might also want to get a 2.5in caddy so you can get some use out of the drive you remove; personally I have a 250GB drive in my PS3 and use the 60GB for backing up important files on my home PC.

Format support on the PS3 is a bit of a mixed bag. I did have a nice rant ready on the lack of DivX support, but between me writing and this being published Sony and DivX have now announced that said codec support will be coming in a future update. Still, it should have been there from the beginning because I now have some 50GB of re-encoded DVD rips (and yes, for the record, I do own the DVDs) which were previously encoded with Xvid but wouldn't play on the PS3. Well, actually I figured out that problem, but more on that later.

OK, I've got that off my chest, now we can move on. Other than DivX, when it comes, the PS3 also boasts support for MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video codecs. The latter will need to be encoded in AVC and it is this format that trailers from PlayStation Network will be provided in. Speaking of which, Sony is doing a pretty good job of making sure that the store gets regular updates and once a week you'll find a few new movie and game trailers up for download, generally in 1080p and standard def versions, along with game demos and, quite often, new arcade games and some classic PlayStation titles re-worked for download - I suggest you check out flOw, Syphon Filter and Crash Team Racing.

On the audio front you'll find WAV, WMA, AAC, MP3 and ATRAC formats supported. I would like to see Flac on that list at some point too, but at least the important bases are covered. As of Firmware 2.0 you can now make custom playlists which, despite my initial sarcasm, is actually very useful.

Having used both Live on the Xbox 360 and the PS3's PSN, I can honestly say that for content and usability the latter has the advantage hands down. Presumably being a big player in the film industry helps Sony a fair bit, but the amount of trailers and regularity of updates is significantly better on PSN.

So we now know what we can do with the standard PlayStation 3 in the ‘out of the box' state but as we know, PS3 is more than just a games console and a quick look at the System section of the menu Will uncover the ‘Install Other OS' This is paramount in allowing owners to use yet another PS3 party trick. To answer the inevitable Digg and Slashdot comment; yes, it will run Linux.

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