Updates - Assasin's Creed, PS3 Divx, NMT

Assassin's Creed
Ubisoft finally released the Assasin's Creed patch that fixed up the freezing issues. After completing the final portion of the game using the patch, I have to say that it appears that they have removed the freezing bugs entirely. The graphical bugs are still there, but it doesn't matter so much to me anymore since I've beaten the game. It seems it doesn't have a whole bunch of replay value. I might go around and collect all the flags one day when I beat Ratchet and Clank and the new Mario game.

PS3 Firmware Update
Sony released the newest firmware for PS3 (2.10). The updates include support for the final Blu-ray specification, and a full Divx-blessed MPEG-4 implementation. I'll be doing some testing with different formats to see what all plays and what all doesn't, but I hear that basically Xvid and Divx both play from media (hard drives, CDs, etc) but that streaming Xvid doesn't work. I'll post my results.

Networked Media Tank
In other news, I was finally "invited" to order that Popcornhour NMT. In case you didn't know, because of all the demand and buzz around the device, they are are allowing customers to place orders on an invitation basis. You sign up in an invitation queue, and when its your turn you get an order invite that is good for two days. Its kind of like preordering to guarantee that you'll get the NMT eventually. So I'm excited about this device shipping...it should be in sometime in January.

Divx support coming to PS3!

That's right, it looks like there is going to be some sort of a software update either from the Divx folks of from Sony that will enable Divx playback on the PS3.
This is a huge step towards making this device a better media hub. I think its really funny that in July, I got the following comment in response to my rant about the suckage of the PS3's media abilities:

"No console supports xvid/divx for a reason and they most like [sic] never will." --Roberto (who won't keep a public profile)

Looks like "never" was less than 6 months. Oh well, people are dumb and horribly wrong sometimes.

Ars is also reporting that the 360 will be getting Divx soon too. This has me now wondering if the 360 would do a better job at playing 1080i HDTV rips. I think the 360 even supports HFS+ formatted drives, making it a good candidate for us Mac folks as a HTPC type of device. The question now for me is how much of a dork do I look like if I have all three of the major gaming system's that are out there now? And I've been looking at this NMT solution from Popcorn hour, but they're making like 50 of those at a time and selling out before I can get one. Oh what to do?