Traveling with a Sony PSP – Part 1: Video

One of the most useful devices I’ve found for traveling with has been Sony’s Playstation Portable. Touted initially as a very high powered games console, the constantly updated firmware (now at 3.90) has kept adding features and functionality in over two years that I’ve had the platform. As I gear up for close to four weeks of travel in March, part of the routine is getting the PSP ready for the trip.

This isn’t as drastic as it sounds – more a case of gathering media that I’ll want to have on the device (or side-loaded onto the laptop ready to move over as required). I’m going to take a look at audio and games in an upcoming post (so subscribe to the RSS if you want to catch those), but here I want to mention video. The PSP, with it’s 16:9 ratio screen, is wonderful for watching video on, and I’ve got a collection of TV Series and Films on the home server already pre-rendered down to a smaller size for the PSP (to save space, but also to boost the audio level) in H.264. Some of these will be burned to DVD for later flights.

I tend to carry a few TV series with me (bless the BBC for six episode long runs!), and this time I’m taking Spooks season 1 (I missed the whole Spooks/MI-5 so am starting from the beginning) and the old faithful of Cowboy Bebop. Leading into March, I’m on a kick for old black and white British WWII films – so I’ve been scouring Amazon New and used (it’s the new Ebay – except it works) for titles like The Longest Day, The Dam Busters, The Wooden Horse, We Dive At Dawn, Colditz, etc. All recommendations for films I’ve missed are welcome in the comments.

And “Where Eagles Dare,” just because war can be fun sometimes as well.

But what I wanted to talk about was the process. The expectation on this is ‘you have a DVD, computer has DVD, computer talks to PSP… DVD should go onto PSP.’ Unfortunatly this isn’t the case. The DVD needs ripped with Application One (and in many cases this needs another application (two) to bypass ‘copy protection’ on the DVD you just bought); Application three to take this ripped DVD file and turn it into something suitable for the PSP (PSPVideo9 is still my favorite), and then drop it into the fle structure on the PSP MemoryStick (Application 4, although as a USB device Windows Explorer should suffice).

Yes, it’s possible for those of us on the edge to cope with this process (and all the re-encoding options we can tweak), but for regular users (looks at my parents) it’s a complicated mix of stuff to do something that should be a one-click. Hats off to Apple, they managed this with music on iTunes. And while I know all about rights, DRM, protection, formats, etc, it’s something that technology needs to be a lot more clear on, so everyone can get the benefits of this.

Unless of course they want to rely on their Airline carrying a decent film in-flight.

In the next part of this series, I’ll talk about podcast and audio on the PSP.