Sony has finally provided us with a look at the revamped PlayStation Store. The video walkthrough that they promised us last week was posted this morning on the PlayStation.Blog. The three-minute-and-fifteen-second video of the pretty new-look store features the equally sexy Grace Chen, the store’s senior manager. She browsed through the store at breakneck speed and also showed off the new ways in which content is organized, along with a few other functions.
I couldn’t be happier with the updated store; for now, it looks like it addresses most, if not all, of the issues that I have with the current store. Chen also mentioned that it is no longer web-based; it’s now a native XMB application. In addition, we now know the content of its concurrent PS3 system software update, v2.30. Dale (and the rest of us) wished for in-game XMB, but sadly, I’m going to have to dash everyone’s hopes — unless you’re a Blu-ray enthusiast who’s been waiting for high-end audio codec support.
Most of you are probably wondering what the hell that seemingly random sequence of letters means. Well, if you’re familiar with DVDs, you’ve probably heard of DTS as a higher-bitrate alternative to standard Dolby Digital. DTS-HD Master Audio is the “next-gen” audio analog of Dolby TrueHD; it’s a lossless audio codec that has an insanely high maximum bitrate of 24.5 Mbps. The v2.30 update also includes support for the DTS-HD HR (“High Resolution”) codec, which provides audio at a constant bitrate of 6.0 Mbps on Blu-ray Discs. Both codecs can deliver up to 7.1 channels of 96 kHz/24-bit sound. (For more details, see here.)
While I’m still using good ol’ stereo sound (2.1 computer speakers FTW!), I know that many owners of high-end home theaters had been clamoring for DTS-HD MA support, and it’s great to see Sony responding to consumer requests like this. I think the updated PS Store looks fantastic — the ability to view trailers/screenshots in-store is particularly awesome — so all we’re waiting for now is in-game XMB, really. Strangely enough, neither the PlayStation.Blog post nor the v2.30 update’s press release (after the jump) mention an official release date for the store/update, but I’m willing to bet that they’ll come out next Wednesday, a day before the store usually gets new content.
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