PS3 Firmware 2.10 Is OUT! DivX Love And Blu-ray 1.1 Included!

The moment all of us PS3 owners have been waiting for has arrived: the folks at Sony have deemed us ready to receive the all mighty version 2.10 update as of today!

What's so important about this update, you ask? None other than DivX playback support, that's what! No longer will I have to boot into my Ubuntu partition on my PS3 to play my *cough* perfectly legitimate *cough* DivX files! No, such a task is now for barbarians! Now I can simply plug in my USB keydrive and play my DivX files directly, no reboots required!

I happily ran over to my PS3 to test DivX playback and it works nicely, though I wish Sony would add the noise and block reduction features present in their DVD playback software to the DivX playback in order to improve the picture on HDTVs. I might stick with my PowerBook hooked up to my HDTV system for now as VLC provides a smoother picture.

Also in the update, another salvo in the HD Format War: support for Blu-ray Profile 1.1 has been added to all PS3s. This means Picture-In-Picture support for playback, as well as support for separate concurrently playing audio tracks. Profile 1.1 also requires local storage in a player, no doubt for certain interactive features.

The rest of the update includes support for WMV playback, Type 3 bitmapping support in the music settings, and, strangely enough, voice changing support in voice chat. The patch notes say this will allow you to change the pitch of your voice during chat. Perhaps we'll hear a bunch of teenagers sounding freakishly manly online from here on out.

If you haven't done so yet, go ahead and hit the update button to get your firmware Christmas present!