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The PS4's Blu-ray playback capabilities have been put under the test by well respected UK publication HDTVtest, and unfortunately, the results aren't all good.
While the PS4 is a respectable Blu-ray player for most film based Blu-ray content, its poor internal deinterlacer is responsible for poorer quality output on many titles and makes it a poorer disc player than its predecessor, the PS3.
Instead of outputting 1080i content via 1080i output, like the PS3, the PS4 chooses instead to deinterlace the content, poorly, resulting in a lower resolution picture. Content affected include special features on discs, and other video based content, such as concerts. For European users watching European content, which is typically encoded in 50i, the same problem occurs too.
For DVD playback, everything except for progressively encoded NTSC content (essentially all PAL DVDs) falls foul of the same deinterlacing problem, again producing lower quality output than the PS3, or most standalone players.
With the Xbox One also suffering from framerate issues, where PAL 50Hz content is outputted at 60Hz, and neither consoles being able to play Blu-ray 3D content, it seems both next-gen game consoles are less than ideal machines for disc playback, despite the presence of powerful hardware.
Users will hope software updates in the future will address some, if not all of these issues.
You can read the full test report here.
While the PS4 is a respectable Blu-ray player for most film based Blu-ray content, its poor internal deinterlacer is responsible for poorer quality output on many titles and makes it a poorer disc player than its predecessor, the PS3.
Instead of outputting 1080i content via 1080i output, like the PS3, the PS4 chooses instead to deinterlace the content, poorly, resulting in a lower resolution picture. Content affected include special features on discs, and other video based content, such as concerts. For European users watching European content, which is typically encoded in 50i, the same problem occurs too.
For DVD playback, everything except for progressively encoded NTSC content (essentially all PAL DVDs) falls foul of the same deinterlacing problem, again producing lower quality output than the PS3, or most standalone players.
With the Xbox One also suffering from framerate issues, where PAL 50Hz content is outputted at 60Hz, and neither consoles being able to play Blu-ray 3D content, it seems both next-gen game consoles are less than ideal machines for disc playback, despite the presence of powerful hardware.
Users will hope software updates in the future will address some, if not all of these issues.
You can read the full test report here.