Hellboy tosses the baby into the air, winds up his grenade launcher, and the baby never comes down. Â The movie has completely frozen.
Was the disc broken? Â Was my PS3 dying?
Nope. Â The latest firmware has trouble with a specific audio codecs on the 60gig fat PS3’s.
After a bit of searching I found I was not alone and that a few other old PS3 owners were encountering symptoms very similar to my own. Hellboy 2 had been previously unwatched, but a friend verified it worked on his player. Â Another movie, Wanted, had played many times without problems on previous firmware revisions. Â After several lens cleaning attempts later, both Wanted and Hellboy 2 still had skipping trouble in the same places.
In the same chapter section of both movies.
Both Universal movies with the same menu system.
Both with DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 sound displayed prominently on the box.
With additional googling, it looks like this problem does not seem wide spread or well diagnosed. Â I also plan to use some of my Netflix queue to test a few more movies (and duplicate the tests of Wanted and Hellboy 2). Â And, hopefully, this is a known issue and is fixed in the next firmware release.