Monday 19 September 2005

Pic of the day: Screenshot from the widescreen anime Honey & Clover which will stretch not only the picture but also your mind.

PSP movies

There is still not one good game for the Playstation Portable that I can see, although Maxis/EA Games have announced their Sims2 PSP for release "fall 2005". In American, I have understood that "fall" is the season before "holiday", which means it ought to be out before Thanksgiving. I don't remember when Thanksgiving is, but I'm sure I'll hear about it as I do every year. (Also known as "Over-Indulgence Day.)

The selection of movies isn't exactly impressive either. More to the point, it is not like you can walk into a movie rental and borrow a movie in the UMD format, like you can with DVD. I assume that this will happen at some time, since Sony is likely to back the format with their considerable resources. (They are heavily into movie making as well.) For now, however, the format is sorely lagging. Then again it came to Norway (and the EU, I think) on September 1st. DVDs weren't exactly crowding out tapes the first month either, but they're totally taking over now. Young people who move out don't get a tape station at all.

What I can do, and do, is use PSP Video 9 to convert some of my downloaded anime to PSP format and save it on my PSP to view away from home. (You can also convert DVDs, but I haven't tried that. I suppose that would solve the "rent a movie" problem if you are able to wait for a quarter of an hour before watching.) Now that I've finished reading David Farland's Runelords series, I can easily watch movies on the commute unless the sun is shining. (Unfortunately the sun shines most days here on the south coast of Norway. But I think most of the locals wouldn't like me to pray for overcast.)

The program is reasonably intuitive. If you're used to computers you'll get the hang of it quickly. If you're only interested in the movies, you should watch their online user's guide with lots of pictures and an animated demonstration. Of course you also need to connect the PSP to the PC using a standard "B" type USB cable. (I can use the one I got with my Zen MP3 player, but didn't know at the time so I bought a new.) You have to choose USB connection on the PSP and then your PC will connect automatically. When you start the program, you can browse for movies in .AVI format (the most common for downloading) and tell it to convert them to MPEG4, the format used in PSP. This will take some minutes, at least a quarter of an hour on my machine. You then choose another part of the program to move the finished movie to the PSP. You need a larger memory than what comes with the new PSP. 256MB is a minimum to watch a movie, and some movies may be larger. I bought a 1GB card, which holds enough for a pretty long train trip. Not that I'm going on those anymore.

I have found that it is possible to watch non-widescreen movies on the PSP, but they look kinda weird. Luckily more and more anime comes in widescreen format, and I'm sticking with them. It's not like I want to watch movies on PSP when I'm at home. I suppose your mileage may vary. You can take it to bed with you, for instance, which is kinda clumsy to do with a PC. But I don't have that kind of amime. ^^*