Watching videos/television program in PSP

Because a lot of individuals already download television show or videos (not that it is suggested), you perhaps prefer to be able to view them mobile, be it while you're getting the railroad train, or waiting for latest movie to begin at the theater, you perhaps prefer to do anything while you await. It is where this software stands out; it permits you to change over particular video recording files for replay in the Playstation portable.

I need to accept, it is astonishing, it is reasonably quick, and the turnout quality is corresponding to Sony’s own video data format for PSP’s UMDs. The great portion about it is that the software is costless; the only cash you'll ever give is the memory card you choose to purchase, right after that, you are able to replay many videos or TV programs into the memory card. (The normal files size for a median quality video is close to 700MB for a 60 minutes and quarter-hour video – this means obtaining a 2GB memory card is going to be good for a couple of videos and 1 television program)

So here is a fast and clean tutorial in how to make it to work nicely.

1. Download PSPvideo9
2. set up the application (should be extremely obvious)
3. Start the application, now, if you start, it will call for which drive is your PSP (choose the suitable setting)
4. You will be shown with a conversion screen
5. Simplest method is to select “One click Transcode”
6. Choose the movie you wish, select OPEN
7. It will commence converting (it is where you are able to snatch a coffee or rest, you are able to reiterate steps five and six to put movies to the “waiting line” to be completely exchanged after the present one is finished up)
8. If coding is completed, you need to find the file in –> C:\Program Files\PSPVideo9\MP_ROOT
9. To transfer the movies to the PSP, just copy the whole folder MP_ROOT straight off onto the PSP’s Drive
10. disconnect USB/place memory card back in, switch on PSP, just go to VIDEOS, and you would be able to view your videos

Enhance your Movie Experience

You can encode any video you've filmed yourself or downloaded off the Internet, but one of the things that really adds value to your portable PSP viewing is the ability to time-shift your favorite TV shows onto it for portable viewing.

If you have a newer model TiVo with TiVo-to-go or any ReplayTV with an Ethernet port, you can easily transfer video from your digital video recorder to your computer over a local network connection.

With a lot of time and a modicum of effort, you can copy the contents of your DVDs to your computer and recompress your favorite videos into MPEG4 for watching on your PSP.

Of course, for each DVD you want to convert to MPEG4, you can expect to spend a good 512 hours of intensive processing time on your computer (depending upon your processor's speed). If you have the patience and the time to spare, then go for it. If not, consider going out to your local media outlet and buying the movie on UMD to help support the growth of the PSP platform.

Most DVDs use DeCSS encryption as a form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) to prevent widespread piracy. The problem with this solution is that besides not really being an effective means of preventing piracy, the DRM also gets in the way of law-abiding consumers like you and me, who only wish to exercise our fair use rights with a product we've purchased and own. This is a particularly nasty catch-22, and I recommend that you get involved with trying to undo this bad law. See the web site for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org/) for more information about DRM, and current and proposed laws that essentially (or potentially) infringe on your rights. Examples of potential threats include the "broadcast flag," which involves use of encoded signals in the content that trigger anti-copying features inside your very own home devices. Although an FCC rule requiring manufacturers to implement broadcast flag technology was overturned in court, its supporters are committed to resurrecting it.
See Wikipedia for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_flag.

Using ffmpeg

The magic key to all the video compression at work in iPSP, PSPWare, and PSP Video 9 is actually a little bit of open source goodness that is developed under Linux, but which can be downloaded and compiled for either Windows or Macintosh: ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.sourceforge.net/index.php). There are a variety of options you can set for encoding files with ffmpeg, but the basic procedure for converting your videos to PSP-compatible MPEG4 files via ffmpeg is:

ffmpegi example.movb 300s 320x240vcodec xvid \
ab 32ar 24000acodec aac example.MP4

The file following is the source file, so replace example.mov with the location and name of the file you are converting. b 300 sets the bit rate to 300kbps. You can make this number higher if you want higher-quality video, but keep in mind that the higher quality the encoding, the larger the file size, and if you go over 768kbps, the file won't play on your PSP. s 320x240 sets the pixel size for the video, and vcodec xvid forces the codec to be used to xvid.

The next set of instructions contains the audio settings for the encoded file.ab 32 sets the audio bit rate to 32kbps, andar 24000 sets the frequency to 24000 Hz, whileacodec aac sets the codec to be used to aac. Finally, you need to specify the path to the new file (example.MP4).

If you're on Mac OS X and you don't like the idea of compiling ffmpeg, you can always use ffmpegX (http://homepage.mac.com/major4/; Shareware $15 USD), which provides a GUI front end for ffmpeg and automates all these settings for you. Its most recent version, shown in Figure 3-7, even includes a PSP MPEG4 preset to make things easier.

Using PSP Video 9

PSP Video 9 (http://www.pspvideo9.com/) is a free, Windows only program for converting videos into MPEG4 files properly formatted for the PSP. PSP Video 9 can also be used to automatically transfer converted videos from your PC to your PSP, and can be used in conjunction with Videora (http://www.videora.com/) to automatically download, convert, and transfer videoblogs (such as Rocketboom) to your PSP.

Using iPSP and PSPWare

Both PSPWare (http://www.nullriver.com/index/products/pspware; $15 USD) and iPSP (http://ipsp.kaisakura.com/; $19.99 USD) are available for both Mac OS X and Windows, and both programs do a very good job of automating the process of converting your movie files into a properly formatted MPEG4 format for your PSP and automatically transferring these files to your PSP. Both of these products offer a variety of options for encoding your video, so you can choose to either have a higher-quality video taking up a large footprint on your Memory Stick or to squeeze numerous lower-quality videos onto your Memory Stick.

The PSP Connect

The first place that you'll want to look for free video content is Sony's PSP Connect page (http://psp.connect.com/). This site features a video tutorial that autoloads when you visit; this video covers the basics of getting video onto your PSP. Since you already know these basics, just click the Stop Video link underneath the virtual PSP and scroll down to the next section on the web page. If you like the tutorial video and want to share it with friends, there is a PDF version of the tutorial available (http://psp.connect.com/tutorial/tutorial.pdf).

Here you will find an assortment of videos that have been prepared for the PSP by Sony. To the right of each video, there is a small graphic indicating the space that the video will take up on your Memory Stick, as well as what size Memory Stick is needed for each video. If you just opened up your brand new PlayStation Portable or simply haven't yet had the chance to grab a larger Memory Stick, you'll be pleased to find that a few of the provided sample videos are geared to fit on the included measly 32MB card. Download a few, drop them on your Memory Stick, and watch away. Here are some other sources of video for your PSP:

Atom Films
For a little more than a month's time after the North American release of the PSP, Atom Films (http://www.atomfilms.com) offered three of their short films preformatted for the PSP. Unfortunately, this trend was short-lived, and neither the films nor new ones like them are available from the site. Nevertheless, they could change their minds, so keep checking back. Even if they don't offer any content specifically geared for the PSP, there are several videos available in downloadable formats on their site, so it is a good place to check for files that you may want to download and convert into PSP-compatible MPEG4 files.

Creative Commons Video
The Creative Commons Video page (http://creativecommons.org/video/) is a good place where you can both share your videos freely with the world and find videos online that others have decided to share.

Internet Archive: Moving Image Archive
If you're not familiar with the Internet Archive, you should take a careful look at the entire site, but, for our purposes, make sure that you look at the Moving Image Archive (http://www.archive.org/details/movies). Here you will find a wide array of video content that is either in the public domain or released under a Creative Commons, License (http://creativecommons.org/) and that you may freely download. There's even a section of freely available feature films (http://www.archive.org/details/feature_films). Nearly all of the videos offered through the Internet Archive come encoded in both 64Kb and 256Kb MPEG4 variants. Unfortunately, although these files are MPEG4, they were encoded with 3ivx (http://www.3ivx.com/) at a setting that isn't readable by the PSP, so you'll still have to convert the files you find on this site.

PSP Hacking 101
PSP Hacking 101 (http://www.psphacking101.com/) is indicative of the kind of cool free content that the PSP is inspiring across the Internet. This site features a downloadable, preformatted-for-the-PSP videocast (think podcast and add video) that covers the basics of what's going on in the PSP homebrew scene. As of this writing, they've released four videocasts, so make sure you check them out.

Rocketboom
Rocketboom (http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/) with Amanda Congdon is one of the most widely known videoblogs (a weblog that consists of videocasts) on the Internet. There's a short, three-minute show released daily during the week, featuring a mix of parodies, interviews, and oddly mixed video fun, alongside snarky op-ed glances at current events. Even cooler, they now offer PSP-formatted ports of each show (http://www.rocketboom.com/port/). You can get the regular video of their shows delivered automatically via your RSS feed reader or via iTunes as a video podcast, but unfortunately, the ease of automatic download is only available for the QuickTime Movie file version of their show; if you choose to download the show this way, you're still going to need to convert it to MPEG4.

BitTorrent
BitTorrent (http://www.bittorrent.com/) has clients for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. If you're not familiar with BitTorrent, it's a peer-to-peer file-sharing technology that distributes the load of downloading large files between all the people currently downloading the file. You can find a plethora of video content online via BitTorrent through various tracker sites. Few of these files will be preformatted for the PSP, but conversion, as you will see in the next section, is easy enough.

iPSP Movie Loader
iPSP Movie Loader (http://ipsp.kaisakura.com/ipspmovie.php) is a cool little free program that promises to allow you to download PSP compatible movie files directly to your PSP. Unfortunately, not many content providers have jumped onboard with this program. As of the writing of this tips, the only content provider linked to on the iPSP Movie Loader site is 29HD Networks (http://www.29hdnetwork.com/psp_guide.html).

Get Videos Online for Your PSP

Fortunately, a wide variety of videos are already available online, and some of them are even preformatted for the PSP. This is just a short list of places you should consider looking for free content for your PSP. Don't be afraid to jump on your favorite search engine and find some others. Some popular search engines have specialized video searches, such as http://video.search.yahoo.com/ and http://video.google.com/.

If you are running Version 2.0 of the firmware, then you can use the PSP's browser to navigate to video files, and if they are hosted online without any compression (.ZIP, for example), you can download the video directly to your /MP_ROOT/100MNV01/ or /MP_ROOT/101MNV01/ folder. To do this, select the link to the file, then hit the Triangle button, navigate to the File menu, hit the X button, select Save Link Target, and hit the X button again. Make sure you save the file in the correct video folder. After it finishes downloading, you can immediately navigate to the video and watch it on your PSP.

The Basics of Video Playing in PSP

In order to view video using your PSP's Memory Stick Duo card, you will need to set a few things up first. Either connect your PSP to your computer or mount your Memory Stick Duo card on your computer. Once the Memory Stick shows up on your computer, you will need to create a new folder in the root directory of the Memory Stick, called MP_ROOT. Inside the MP_ROOT folder, you will then need to create another folder and name it either 101MNV01 or 100MNV01. The manual that came with your PSP tells you to name the folder 100MNV01, but if you use iPSP or PSPware to automatically manage your videos, they will create a folder named 101MNV01. Both folders seem to work for watching video. Whichever name you go with, this folder is where all of your MPEG4 videos must go.

The PSP cannot play MPEG4 video encoded at anything higher than 768kbps, so certain high-quality MPEG4 files will need to be converted to a lower bit rate, and the PSP will not recognize the file unless it has a name in the format of M4V10001.MP4. The file needs to start with M4V followed by five numbers, and then it must end in .MP4.

For MPEG4 files that have been specially formatted for the PSP, there will usually be another file alongside it. If your movie file's name is M4V10001.MP4, this file will be named M4V10001.THM. The THM file is a simple 160 x 120 thumbnail saved in JPEG format at 72dpi that is associated with the video file. As long as the name of the THM file is the same as the MP4 file, this picture will be displayed alongside the video file in the PSP's Video interface.

Once you have the proper directories set up on your PSP's Memory Stick, drop some videos into either /MP_ROOT/100MNV01/ or /MP_ROOT/ 101MNV01/, disconnect from your computer, and navigate to Video on your PSP, select Memory Stick, hit the X button, select the video you want to watch, and hit the X button again. Sit back and enjoy. If you don't have any video yet, then read on to find some free content online and to learn how to convert your own videos to PSP-friendly MPEG4s.

Version 2.0 of the firmware added support for another video file format: AVC. These files follow a similar naming convention to the regular .MP4 files, as they are named MAQxxxxx.MP4, where xxxxx is five numbers. AVC edges out MP4 in the image quality department.

Get a Bigger Memory Stick for Movie Playing

Unfortunately, Sony only includes a 32MB Memory Stick Duo card with the PSP. This is fine for saving games, keeping a few pictures, and even storing a few MP3s. If you try to put your own video content on your PSP, however, you'll quickly find that 32MB is simply not enough.

I recommend that you get the largest Memory Stick that you can afford and that you settle for nothing smaller than 256MB. You can get Memory Stick Duo cards in sizes as large as 2GB, but those are still a bit pricey. Fortunately, since the introduction of the 2GB Memory Stick Duo cards, the 1GB cards have fallen drastically in price. You can easily find one available online in the $125-150 USD range, but if you are patient and watch sites like DealNews (http://www.dealnews.com), you can probably snag one for under $100 USD. If you sign up for a free account with DealNews, you can create an alert for Memory Stick Duo cards, and they will email you whenever any new deals are listed.

Once you have a larger Memory Stick with some room to spare, it's time to find out how and where to put your videos on the stick.

Cutting Down on the Glare

The PlayStation Portable comes with a gorgeous screen, capable of displaying wonderful graphics while playing video games or DVD-quality video while watching a UMD movie. Unfortunately, this beautiful, shiny screen can also be the PSP's Achilles' heel in certain lighting situations, as it is highly reflective.

One good thing about the highly reflective nature of the PSP's screen is that it can be used as a makeshift mirror whenever the console is switched off.


Here's a short list of things you can do to help keep the reflective glare from being too much of a distraction while watching your UMD movies:

• Hold the PSP at a slight angle, directed at something uniformly colored, such as the ceiling. If you are staring straight into your PSP's screen, you're going to see a reflection of your ugly mug every time a light hits your face or the movie features a particularly dark scene.
• Keep the back of the PSP to the light. The less light hitting the PSP's screen, the less of a reflection that you'll see. However, keep the previous suggestion in mind: if you are facing the blaring sun and looking straight on at the PSP, that light is going to ricochet off of your face and onto its screen.
• Try to watch movies in uniformly lit situations. If everything is lit equally in a room, there will be less distracting reflections on the PSP screen, should they occur. A bright lamp reflecting in a dark room can seriously impede your movie-watching fun.
• Try to watch in the dark. There's a reason that movie theaters turn out all the lights before a movie.
• Use the PSP's brightness control. There's a button with a slightly square icon immediately to the right of the PSP icon sitting under your gorgeous PSP screen. Hitting it a few times cycles through the different brightness settings for the screen. Switch as the occasion warrants.

This short list of five tips will get you started. For more advanced ways of avoiding the glare, you'll want to keep your PSP clean.

How to use control panel for watching the movie?

While you are watching a movie, hit the Triangle button to display the control panel. This control panel gives you immediate control over the movie you are watching without jumping back to the UMD's Menu. The control panel also allows you to change certain settings, such as UMD Video Volume that normally would only be accessible via the PSP's main control panel under Settings. Perhaps the best thing about the control panel is that it gives you access to extra features of your UMD movie that the movie's main menu doesn't provide.

I'm not going to go into every single feature of this control panel, as that would become tedious and is already covered in the manual to the PSP. However, I am going to cover a few bits of control panel goodness that I think can help you optimize your UMD movie-watching experience.

Use subtitles.
If you are on a PSP running Version 1.01.52 of the firmware, the fourth icon in the top row of the control panel controls your subtitles; if you are on a PSP running Version 2.0 of the firmware, the fifth icon in the top row of the control panel controls your subtitles. Highlighting it and hitting X will switch the subtitles. Continuing to hit X will cycle you through all the available subtitles, as well as the Off setting.

What I've discovered in a few of the UMD movie titles that I own is that there are sometimes more subtitles available via this control panel pane than are offered through the main menu to the movie.

For example, the House of Flying Daggers UMD disk features two English subtitle tracks, although only one is readily available from the Menu screen (the Menu screen also fails to provide access to the French subtitle track, which is also available via this control panel). The first English subtitle track is a basic track that provides you with a translation of the entire movie. The second English track, however, only provides subtitles for the songs in the movie, which remain untranslated when listening to the English audio track of the movie.

Since your PSP provides portable movie watching, you are often going to find yourself watching a movie in areas with different levels of noise.

I often keep the English subtitle track of any movie I am watching going, just in case the dialogue gets drowned out by the sound of the subway as a new train arrives or for watching in situations where I don't want to wear my headphones but can't hear everything clearly.

Knowing how to quickly access the subtitles is useful if you can't quite make out a bit of whispered dialogue. Simply rewind the movie a little bit by hitting the left arrow on the keypad, pause the movie by hitting the Start button, then pull up the control panel by hitting Triangle, navigate over to subtitles, hit X until you hit the track you need, and hit Start to resume play of the movie. Now you can quickly read the snippet of dialogue you missed, and then switch the subtitles back off and get rid of the control panel to continue viewing.

Frame Advance
In addition to the same controls that are available via the PSP's default controls, the control panel features a few more controls, including Frame Advance. This is the sixth icon in the second row and it simply does what it says, advancing frame by frame through the movie each time you hit X while it is highlighted.

A-B Repeat, Repeat, and Clear
The third row of icons in the control panel features the A-B Repeat (Version 2.0 firmware only), Repeat, and Clear controls. With A-B Repeat, you can mark the movie at point A and then again at point B, and the section between these two points will continually repeat until you either hit A-B Repeat again or hit Clear. With Repeat, you can select to repeat the entire movie or the current chapter. Clear simply clears whatever repeat setting you have selected and sets it back to normal play.

Display
The next to the last icon on the top row, immediately next to the Help panel, is the Display control panel. Highlighting this control panel and hitting X will bring up the name of the movie you are currently watching in the top-left corner of the screen and a thin blue and white strip at the bottom-right corner of the screen that indicates your progression through the movie and the time remaining (see Figure 3-5).

Most notably, the Display option is useful if you want to keep track of your progress through a movie and how much of a movie remains. Once you activate it, you can leave it running after closing out the control panel. This is very nonintrusive in movies that are letterboxed and leave black bars on the top and bottom of the screen, but if you are watching a movie that takes full advantage of the PSP's screen, you may find the Display distracting or even annoying.

Nevertheless, since the PSP doesn't always remember where you last were in a movie (it usually does, but sometimes it doesn't), I recommend activating this feature whenever you know you are going to stop watching a movie for a while, or if you intend to switch out the UMD disk for a while. If you can remember that the blue progress bar was up to about the middle of the S in the PSP logo, it'll be easier to find where you left off when you come back to it later. Consider jotting this information down on a piece of paper you keep with your PSP.

This information is even more useful with Version 2.0 of the firmware, which includes chapter and timestamp displays for the UMD that are much easier to mark down.

Firmware 2.0 also adds the Go To command (the second item on the top row of the control panel), whereby you can select the exact chapter or timestamp location where you want to go.

How to Navigate the Movie in PSP?

The title screen for the UMD contains many of the usual options that you are most likely familiar with from watching DVDs. Through this interface, you can set up the audio options and subtitles, view any included bonus materials (like trailers, cut scenes, and sometimes even little behind-the-scenes documentaries), make scene or chapter selections to start watching a movie from a specific scene, or simply play the movie.

By default, the title screen is usually where you are taken on a UMD movie the first time it is inserted into your PSP. If, while watching the film, you would like to return to the title screen, hit the Square button on the PSP.

If you hit the Square button by accident while watching a film, select Play Movie and hit X to return to the same spot you were before mistakenly hitting the Square button.

Sony did a good job of designing a portable interface that lets you quickly get out of a game or movie, but which is also very forgiving should you accidentally hit the wrong button.

One of the cool things about the PSP is that nearly all of these options are available from anywhere within the movie without returning to the title screen. If you hit the Triangle button while a movie is playing, a control panel in the form of an overlay graphic with a variety of options will pop up onscreen. In this figure, I used the keypad to highlight the ? (or Help) option and am about to hit X to bring up the Help menu.

The movie will continue playing in the background (unless you paused it before pulling up this menu). Use the keypad to navigate through the different menu options available. I'll go over some of these in a moment, but first I want to take a look at the Help menu. Highlight the ? icon and hit the X button. The movie will pause, and a quick guide to the PSP's basic movie navigation functions will be displayed.

The Video Help screen displays all the basic navigational features for viewing a UMD movie on the PSP. Take some time to familiarize yourself with these basics. To return to the movie, hit O.

The only information about these basic controls that isn't covered by this screen involves the Fastforward and Fast Reverse controls. If you pause the movie by hitting the Start button and then hit the Forward button on the keypad once, the movie will play in slow motion frame by frame. If you hit Forward/Reverse on the keypad during regular play, the movie will begin fastforwarding/rewinding with a 1 next to the arrows. If you tap the button again, the speed will increase and a 2 will be displayed. A third tap will display a 3 and the movie will fastforward/rewind at its quickest viewable speed.

To jump forward or back to another section of the movie, simply use the L and R triggers on the PSP.

Let me repeat that: the L and R triggers take you back a chapter and forward a chapter in the movie, respectively.

This is quite possibly the most annoying part of watching a UMD movie on the PSP, because you will accidentally hit these buttons and skip ahead or back in the movie from time to time.

Since you know this, consider holding the PSP differently while watching a movie than you normally would hold it while playing games. Also, be hyper-aware of these buttons whenever you are moving around. I've become pretty good at avoiding them, but every once in a while, I'll be shifting in my chair or in bed and click! I'm suddenly out of the dramatic love scene and into an intense battle sequence.

How to Set up and Start Movie in PSP?

When you first insert a UMD Movie into the PSP, you simply have to navigate to Video UMD in the PSP's main interface. Keep the UMD icon selected for a moment, and the background of the PSP will change into a graphic for the movie, and a small preview window featuring a repeated video clip from the movie, most likely with some accompanying music, will replace the generic UMD icon.

Hitting the Start button or the X button on the PSP will take you to the menu screen for the movie, or it will immediately begin playing the movie. If after listening to some MP3s on your PSP or playing a game, you go back to a UMD movie, it will usually return you to the place where you left off.

This isn't always the case. For the most part, the PSP is effective at keeping track of where you were in a UMD movie the next time you go to watch it, but not always.

Because of this, it is a good idea to make a note of where you are in a movie before switching away to another activity on the PSP.

If you've been watching a movie, but you've not really been able to give it the attention it deserves, there's a quick trick here to start over from the beginning. Hitting the Triangle button on the PSP will bring up a small informational menu on the right-hand side of the screen with "Play," "Play from Beginning," and "Information" as options. Choose "Play" if you want to try to skip past the UMD disks menu and immediately begin playing the movie from the last point you left off (assuming you haven't removed the UMD disk), choose "Play from Beginning" to start over from the beginning of the film, and choose "Information" to see any metadata connected to the movie, including the parental settings.