Firmware 2.20 for the Sony PlayStation 3 brought us a load of goodies when it arrived a few days back - among them support for BD-Live and even opening the door for Hello World. By now, you should have realized that the firmware updates won't be stopping anytime soon. Thanks to an AV Watch interview of Sony engineers, we can be one step ahead of these developments.

Product Planning director Naoya Matsui headlined a group of Sony engineers who gave us insights on upcoming plans for BD-Live and the PS3 firmware. Topping the list would be the future of Blu-ray movie playback.

If today, we need the latest PS3 firmware in order to access the PlayStation Network or play the newest games, then in the near future, we may need a firmware update first in order to watch the latest Blu-ray movie because of new encryption keys. Case in point, Resident Evil: Extinction.

Although firmware 1.8 had the key, the movie had a firmware 2.10 updater because it renders image quality better.

As for other firmware plans, we should expect these PS3 firmware updates to continue being free of charge. Moreover, these updates will come on a quarterly basis. The April revision of the PlayStation Store is its only exception.

Here are more insights from Matsui and the Sony Engineering team:

• In-game XMB is now being discussed. But there are no updates as of yet.
• We may expect the integration of 1080 de-interlacing, mosquito noise reduction and the DTS-HD Master Audio (a lossless audio codec). Those are hardcore features for the hardcore home theater aficionado.
• Firmware 2.20 is stil (sic) without Managed Copy and Portable Copy features
• Memory resource usage can be reduced a lot with 2.20
• The web browser runs faster, but more improvements will be made.
• Optical discs and media files goes through 2 different paths during PS3 playback.
• Mosquito noise reduction was created for digital TV recordings
• Mosquito noise reduction has a lower processing load.
• LTH support took a long time because of tests.
  

That's a slew of information from the Sony engineers. Now that the PlayStation 3 is still rated higher than any stand-alone Blu-ray player, we can confidently say the frontier is just opening up. More updates as QJ.NET retrieves them.