[Valiran]

According to a well-placed industry source who wishes to remain anonymous, developers were recently notified that a new revision of the PlayStation 3 is in the testing process that will feature a new copy protection system not on the motherboard but inside the BD-ROM drive itself, similar to the Xbox 360.

Presumably this would at least prevent these newer consoles from running copied games with an additional layer of authentication. It’s likely that there will be some kind of watermark on genuine PlayStation 3 discs that the drive is looking for. All of these measures are in response to the acquisition of the PS3 root encryption key earlier this year (2011) by hacker GeoHot which allows unlicensed code to be run on the PlayStation without restriction.

This new hardware revision will be accompanied by a firmware upgrade that contains newly optimized Blu-ray playback drivers that can now handle BD-Java during Blu-ray 3D playback, at least on the 2D level.

This is a godsend for Blu-ray authors because they no longer have to author discs 3 times. Once for 2D, once for PS3 and once for full power BD3D.

There is no news whether or not this new firmware will also bring lossless audio to PS3 3D playback but our source indicates they doubt that this feature will be added any time soon due to the number of SPEs decoding the additional 1080p stream occupies.

This hardware revision is expected to accompany a price drop on the system hardware that could come as early as the Tokyo Game Show this September (2011).

Source: Rumor: New PS3 revision coming, new copy protection along with BD-J for BD-3D | Gamertell | Gamertell