Portable Video Players

I watch a lot of movies. Usually, Hyun-joo and I roll out my Epson projector and kick back for some room-filling entertainment. During the past year or so I began to get interested in PVP's. Archos first turned my head with their line up, making me absolutely drool over the AV400 series.

The pricing was expensive, but ultimately I just couldn't answer the big question whether or not I really need a PVP (or how cool I would thing one was if I were to own one).

Then last month I bought a PSP for the intent of having somthing to play videogames with during my downtime. I saw some of my students playing with them and the PSP did look sexy. I'm less interested in playing games on it now than I am watching videos! And I have some good games (at least for my style of gaming): Twisted Metal, Metal Gear Ac!d, and Untold Legends. I bought "Appleseed" on UMD for a long flight, just to check out the quality. As impressed as I was, I still think it is silly to pay so much for somthing you can buy on DVD.

To be fair, you should guage the cost of the UMD, with the cost of a DVD, the time it takes to rip and encode the movie, the process of saving it to a MS as opposed to having a UMD to "throw" into the PSP at any time for viewing, and the quality of your ripped movies vs. that of the UMD. I guess in some cases, it might be a close call. Living abroad, that decision easily gets flipped into the "rip the DVD and encode it yourself" category. You choose.

Reading through the April 2005 edition of MacAddict I came over a product by Nyko that I had forgotten about. The "MoviePlayer" converts my 3G 40GB iPod into a media player. I haven't read any reviews about it yet, but I'm very interested in using my iPod as a PVP.

If you like movies and you're a gearhead... you'll probably never regret having a good PVP. You'll be amazed how you can fill up "small time" with some video entertainment of your own choosing. I just hope I don't lose my fiance now.

I'm not going to throw down any more cash for a different PVP now that I have a PSP, but I'm not totally satisfied yet. I'm not really happy with the line up of games for the PSP. The memory cards and extra batteries are outrageously priced. The encoding software for DVD to PSP has a long way to go. And I'm not happy that Sony limits the quality level for MS playback. Come on guys! Who knows what's the future of the PSP will be? It's not even a year old yet. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

PSP Batteries

I'm looking into purchasing another battery for the PSP for my trip back to Japan. Right now there seems to be two products available. Both of which are pretty expensive. I don't want to get an external option, like the Nyko Charger Case, since it's just too much - especially since the thing will eventually wear out as well.

PSP encoding

I picked up a PSP when I was in Hawaii and it's been kick ass! I've got three games and one movie: Untold Legends, Metal Gear Ac!d, Twisted Metal, and Appleseed. I've synched some photos using PSPWare and have even begun encoding movies to playback from a 1GB MSDuo. It would be great if someone could design a slim HD that used the MSProDuo interface so that we could really store a lot of stuff for our PSP's. It's a great little platform with a lot of potential.

I have some stuff to figure out about PSPWare: I'd like to know what's up with the QT encoding toggle for starters. It's a pretty slick interface and I don't have any complaints so far. I've been burning the PSP format movies to take home. Right now, I don't think I can take more than 2 movies with me on the go with just one 1GB card. The 2GB cards are over $300 freaking bucks right now! Ouch.

I found this post from the psp411.com forum:

There are many ways to get DVD -> PSP, as you pointed out. My preferred method, which you didn't mention above, is using ffmpegX. The PSPWare developers recommend HandBrake though. Personally, I haven't had and success with HandBrake at all.

This is how I do it.:

1) Use MacTheRipper to create a single VOB, click on MODE, then choose 'Title Only Extraction' (and choose the Main Feature, marked with MF) or to select a specific chapter to rip, use the 'Title - Chapter Selection' option.

At this point, you can drop the VOB file directly into PSPWare, however, you may end up with a movie that has the wrong soundtrack, or plays the commentary track etc. I would recommend using a single chapter extraction to test first. I rarely actually do this, preferring to proceed to step 2...

2) run ffmpegX, and drag the VOB file into the FROM field. At this point there are two paths to take...

2a) You can choose the PSP preset in the TO side of the window, and pretty much just click encode from here. This gives a very small file size. And the file can simply be added to the drop box in PSPWare, or can be copied to the correct directory structure under ~/Documents/PSPWare, and it will appear in the movie list when you next refresh the movie page in PSPWare.

OR

2b) (the option I usually take), leave the TO side as default. The advantage to doing this is that you can change various streams if need to, and you can also choose subtitles if you want them, such as when converting Anime titles. Click on the AUDIO tab. Here you can change the Audio Track, and you can also up the Audio Gain. I tend to set it to +9. Next click on the FILTERS tab. Here you can choose to add subtitles (tick the VOB Subtitles checkbox), and you can choose the subtitle stream in the next drop down. To ensure you have what you want, use the preview in the bottom right hand side of the window, this lets you preview anywhere in the movie. Now just hit Encode and wait.

3) Once the AVI file has been created, just drag that to PSPWarem and it'll output the PSP-ready file, with the correct audio & subtitle streams.