Topic: PlayTV Broken

Hello all, this is my first post on this forum after just joining.

To quickly introduce myself, I've got an original 80GB Phat PS3 under my TV, from new (bought I think around 2008/2009). Obviously, I've changed out the original HDD long time ago. Now has a 500GB HDD.

I've never done anything with my PS3 which isn't official.

I've got PlayTV for my PS3, again, since it was first released, and I'm still a user of this addon to the console, all be it not as much as I used to, but it's still the only way I can record TV things for long term posterity, so I'm always keen to have it working.

Years ago, Sony messed up PlayTV good and proper, but then released a fix for that, and it was all good again after only a few weeks of downtime. I can't remember fully when that was.

More recently, this seems to have been done again at some point within the past year (i think). I had 4.90 firmware on there, and for the first time in ages, I left the console in standby over night two nights ago. The yesterday morning, when coming down the stairs I realised the console green light was on....

I'm now going to cut a long story short.

Basically, my PS3 got properly stuck in a loop where it was crashing over and over, and I couldn't even switch off the console in a safe manner; instead, having to resort to the rocker switch at the back. Obviously this meant the database corruption message etc etc. During this "fight", I realised it was needing a firmware update. So not thinking any more about it, I updated it to 4.91 and ran out the door to work. After fiddling with it a bit more last night, I seem to now have it more stable again, although i've now realised that PlayTV is broken in a similar way to how it was broken years ago (from memory).

PlayTV loads up seemingly fine, and works great (seemingly), and I can watch TV (not tried recording or anything like that yet)....for about 3-5mins, and then it crashes, and live TV freezes! Pressing the Playstation button to then select QUIT PlayTV results in the console beeping 3 times and then rebooting itself completely. If I quit PlayTV BEFORE it crashes (i.e. within a minute or so of first booting it up), then it closes down as would be expected, back to the home screen without issue.

I'm wondering how many other people are still using PlayTV, and if anyone else has similar issues or not. If this is a known issue, then does Sony know about it? - do they care? Is there a known firmware release where it's known to be the last where PlayTV worked ok, or not? It was definitely ok in 2018 as I have a load of recordings from then, but after that, i'm not sure. I think it was ok on 4.89, but I couldn't be 100% certain.

Finally, this leads me to the ultimate question, since I know next to nothing about CFW on a PS3:

Can I roll back my PS3 official 4.91 to an earlier official firmware where PlayTV wasn't broken if Sony never fix it themselves, using any clever tools you guys develop here?

I apologise for the length of my first post.