How to Transfer Podcasts to Your PSP?

While downloading podcasts using iTunes is pretty straightforward, getting them onto your PSP can be a little tricky. Since iTunes will only sync your music library to an iPod, it is necessary to go outside of iTunes to get the downloaded podcasts onto your PSP.

The first step is to locate where iTunes is keeping your Music Library. If you're using a Mac, launch iTunes and click iTunes Preferences. Then click the gear icon labeled Advanced. If you're using Windows, launch iTunes and select Edit Preferences, then click the Advanced tab. The first item on this page of the dialog box labeled "iTunes Music Folder Location" is where you will find your music files. On a Mac, the default location is ~/Music/iTunes Music/ (in your home folder). In Windows, the default is C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\.

Browse to the folder where your music library is located. You should see a list of folders corresponding with the names of artists in your Music Library, as well as a folder labeled Podcasts. Open this folder and the folder named after the podcast(s) you have just downloaded. In this folder should be the podcast's episode itself, named similarly to what appears in iTunes.

To transfer the podcasts [Hack #23] to your PSP, plug in your PSP to a USB port and from the PSP home screen, select Settings, then USB Connection. On a Mac, a new volume will appear on your desktop. In Windows, a new drive will be mapped under My Computer. Double-click on the volume or drive and then open the PSP folder. Inside, you should see some media folders; open the MUSIC folder.

All you need to do now is to copy the podcasts to your PSP. Simply drag and drop the podcast's episode from the folder in your music library to the MUSIC folder on your PSP. Before unplugging your PSP, make sure to eject it first. On a Mac, drag the volume on your desktop to the trash can in the dock. In Windows, right-click on the drive and select Disconnect.

Exit USB Mode on your PSP and navigate to the Music icon. Then highlight and press X on the Memory Stick icon. You should now see the podcast episode you just transferred to your PSP.

You may want to create a folder inside the MUSIC folder called "Podcasts" and instead transfer podcasts there. This will not only keep Podcasts separate from the rest of your music, but it will also allow quick access for transferring new podcasts and deleting old ones.

How to download podcast?

The easiest way to obtain podcasts is via iTunes. Launch iTunes and click on Podcasts in the Source list on the left. Near the bottom of the iTunes window, there will be text reading Podcast Directory with an arrow next to it. Click the arrow and you will be taken to the iTunes Music Store podcast directory.

What you should now see before you are a number of different podcasts that you may download. Pick a podcast you find interesting by clicking on it. You will then be presented with a list of available "episodes" for that particular podcast. In the Price column (most, if not all, of them are free) to the right, you will see a button labeled Get Episode. Click this button and the episode will be downloaded to your music library.

There are some podcasts that will not play on the PSP. Podcasts that fall into this category are enhanced podcasts and podcasts that are purchased and contain digital rights management. If you find that a podcast you really want to listen to will not play on your PSP, try burning the podcast to an audio CD from iTunes. Then, rip the podcast to your music library as an MP3, using iTunes' CD-ripping features.

Listen to Podcasts that you've subscribed to, using Apple's iTunes.

Podcasting, in its simplest form, is a way of broadcasting online that combines prerecorded audio files with some kind of syndication technologyusually RSS 2.0. What this means for listeners is that they can subscribe to a podcast and automatically be notified when new episodes of the podcast are released. Programs that automate the process (podcatchers) have made obtaining and listening to podcasts extremely easy. Because of this, podcasting has taken off as one of the premier forms of online broadcasting.

If you've upgraded to Version 2.6 of the PSP firmware, you'll find that Sony has added a new podcast-savvy (sort of) ability to your PSP: RSS Channel, located alongside your Internet Browser under the Network section of your PSP. Using your browser, you can select RSS 2.0 enclosures for podcasts and subscribe to them on your PSP. The cool or bad part about this, depending on your point of view, is that RSS Channel streams the podcasts to your PSP over a live Internet connection. This is great if you are near an open wireless access point, but it eliminates the portability of podcasts, since there is no way to download the podcasts to your Memory Stick via the RSS Channel.

There are many programs you can use to obtain podcasts. The most popular podcast-specific program (known as iPodder until Apple persuaded them to change their name) is Juice Receiver (http://juicereceiver/sourceforge.net/index.php), a free, multi-platform program that allows you to subscribe to podcasts either through a provided podcast directory or by manually typing in the address of a podcast feed. Once subscribed to a podcast, iPodder can be set to check for and download the latest episodes of a podcast. To listen to downloaded podcasts, you must open the files using a media player such as Windows Media Player or WinAMP.

This section, however, will use iTunes, because it's slightly more convenient than Juice Receiver. You can both download and listen to podcasts from within iTunes. Furthermore, the Podcasts section of the iTunes Music Store features a large and easy to navigate podcasting directory. However, you can adapt the instructions in this section to your podcatcher of choice.

The Code for Portal Creation

Download "memoryportal.php" in http://ifile.it/b3a8mq1

Type this code into your text editor of choice and save it as make_index.pl. Place this file in the root directory of your PSP's Memory Stick, either by dragging it there or executing one of the following commands:

Unix, Mac OS X, Linux
cp make_index.pl /Volumes/Untitled

Windows
xcopy make_index.pl F:\

If your Memory Stick has a name other than Untitled, Mac OS X users should use the appropriate directory name. If you are on Windows, choose the drive letter (F:, in these examples) that your PSP was assigned. If you are on Linux, be sure to replace /Volumes/Untitled with the mount point of your PSP.

To run the script, you must run the following command from the command line.

In Mac OS X, use the Terminal (located in /Applications/Utilities/) and run the following commands:

cd /Volumes/Untitled
perl make_index.pl

These are the same commands you will use in UNIX/Linux.

In Windows, open a command prompt and run:

F:
cd \
perl make_index.pl

Once the script begins running, you will be prompted for your del.icio.us username. If you enter nothing, this step will be skipped. After the command has completed running, you can navigate to the root level of your Memory Stick and you will see a newly created index.html file. Double-click on this file to launch it in your computer's web browser and inspect the results of the code.

Once you have this script created, you can run it every time your PSP is connected to your computer to update the index.html file.

On your PSP, make sure that you bookmark file:/index.html in the browser, so that you can easily navigate to this index of all of your photos, text files stored in the Notes folder, and your del.icio.us bookmarks tagged with PSP. Consider making it your home page.

Installing Dependencies for Portal Creation

This script uses PerlMagick and cURL to work its magic. Since Perl is included in most modern systems, there are only a few bits that you need to make sure are in place before beginning.

Windows
If you are on Windows, first make sure you have Perl installed (we suggest ActivePerl, which you can get from http://www.activestate.com). Next, grab PerlMagick, which is part of the ImageMagick package available under the Windows Binary Release section of the ImageMagick site (http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php). Next, install cURL from http://curl.haxx.se/download.html and put the executable in your PATH. C:\Windows will work, but we suggest you add an entry to your PATH and put it there. If you choose the version of cURL with SSL support, you may need to install additional libraries. This script does not require SSL support.

Mac OS X
If you are on Mac OS X, you need to install ImageMagick. Download the source of ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org/script/install-source.php). Extract the source, and then from the Terminal (which is located in /Applications/Utilities/), type the following commands:

cd ImageMagick-
./configure && make
sudo make install

Each line is a separate command. Enter the first command, then hit return and wait while a bunch of text flies by in the Terminal window. This will build ImageMagick from the source. If the string of text comes up with any errors at the end after the second command, then try running the command again with sudo at the beginning. After the third command, when sudo is invoked you will be asked for a password (and possibly a warning, if this is the first time you invoke sudo). Enter the Administrator password for your computer.

After ImageMagick successfully compiles, you may need to compile Perl-Magick, if it was not compiled automatically. Enter the following commands to build PerlMagick (the PerlMagick directory is a subdirectory of the ImageMagick- directory):

cd PerlMagick
perl Makefile.PL
sudo make install

Again, if there are any errors in step two, try invoking sudo at the beginning of the command.

Make sure you check the installation documentation that accompanies ImageMagick (in particular, the README and INSTALL files), since you may need some other programs that ImageMagick depends on. For example, on Mac OS X, we needed to install libjpeg (see http://www.ijg.org/) from the source tarball (jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz), using the following commands:

tar xvfz jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
cd jpeg-6b/
./configure && make
sudo make install
sudo make install-lib
sudo ranlib /usr/local/lib/libjpeg.a

UNIX/Linux
Make sure that you have PerlMagick installed. This should be available in your Linux distributions package repository. If not, you can follow the Mac OS X instructions to compile it from source. You will also need cURL.

Creating a Portal for Your Memory Stick Files

Why not keep a directory of all the local images and text files on your Version 2.0 PSP in HTML format, for easy access via the browser? Better yet: why not automate the process with Perl and automatically grab all of your psp-tagged del.icio.us bookmarks in there to boot?

Well, you have a PSP with Version 2.0 or later of the firmware, so you don't have all the great homebrew emulators available for the earlier versions. However, unless you downgrade from Version 2.0, you are making do by loading every JavaScript-capable game or program you can find onto your Memory Stick and converting all your documents to text files for viewing via the nifty little browser that Sony included with Version 2.0 of the firmware.

Let's really trick out your PSP by putting together a Perl script that will run on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, with only a few dependencies. This script will automatically scrape the photos contained in your Memory Stick's /PSP/PHOTO/ folder, scrape any text files contained in /PSP/NOTES/, optionally grab any links on your del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) account that are tagged with "psp," and build an index.html file linking to all these files and located at the root directory of your Memory Stick.

How to assemble ebook for your PSP?

Once you're done converting the PDF to JPEGs, you should have a folder containing images named Page0001.jpg, Page0002.jpg, etc. Name this folder whatever you want the title of your e-book to be and place the folder inside the PHOTO folder inside the PSP folder on your Memory Stick. After you unmount your PSP from your computer, simply navigate to Photo, make sure the Memory Stick is selected, and hit the X button. Scroll through the images and list of folders until you locate your e-book.

Highlight your e-book and press the X button to load the first page. If you hit the Triangle button to bring up the control panel, you can select the first option on the top row, View Mode, to set the page to be zoomed in, so that you can easily go through all the pages of your book by clicking the R trigger without having to continually rezoom. To scan up and down the page, use the analog stick. Most pages will load centered, so you will need to scan up to the top of the page and then scan down as you read. If you need to zoom in on a section of the text, hold down on the square button and move the analog stick up and down to zoom in and out.

The great thing about this tips is that every document that is printable from your computer can be converted into JPEGs for viewing on your PSP on the go.

How to Convert PDF to JPEGs?

After I have my 8 inch by 9 inch PDF file, I need to convert it into a series of JPEGs numbered in sequence and all contained within a folder that I can place inside /PSP/PHOTO/ on my PSP's Memory Stick. For the most part, any imaging program capable of working with PDFs can be used to convert PDFs to JPEG, so make sure you look at the following programs before you go searching around the web for a PC version of programs like PDF 2 PSP.

Adobe Acrobat.
Most likely, you already have a copy of Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer. They are actually both the same program, only Adobe has recently renamed Acrobat Reader as Adobe Reader. If you don't have either on your computer, you can grab a copy for free directly from Adobe (http://www.adobe.com). This program will allow you to view the PDF you have created, but unfortunately it does not support exporting the page images into different formats.

If you own the full version of Adobe Acrobat, you can export the PDF file as a series of JPEGs, and Acrobat will even do the work of naming each separate page as another image in sequence (Image001.jpg, Image002.jpg, etc.).

Preview.app
If you are on Mac OS X, you can use Preview (included with the operating system and located in the Applications folder). If you open the PDF for your e-book in Preview, you can use File Save As to manually save each page as a separate JPEG file. For a large document, this can be laborious to say the least, so it is not the ideal solution.

Image-editing programs
Using an image-editing program such as Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you can open a selected page of the PDF and resave it as a JPEG with high quality compression. On Mac OS X, Graphic Converter (available from http://www.lemkesoft.com/en/graphcon.htm for $30 USD) can do the same. You might already have some sort of image-editing program that came with a digital camera or scanner and is capable of opening PDFs and converting them to JPEGs. The GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/), is available for Windows, Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X, and can handle a wide variety of formats, including PDF and JPEG.

PDF 2 PSP
If you are using a Mac, then you can grab a helpful, free little program called PDF 2 PSP (http://pdf2psp.sourceforge.net/).

In PDF 2 PSP, you choose the location of the PDF and then a folder where you want the collection of sequenced JPEGs to be stored. If your PSP is connected and mounted on your computer, you can even have the program output directly to /PSP/PHOTO/ on your Memory Stick. You have the option to either adjust the picture to be displayed in portrait or landscape view on the PSP, you can set the quality of the image, and you can set the size of the pages to a variety of options: Original Size, Fit to Screen, Fit to Width, 2x Screen Width, and High Resolution. I recommend choosing Original Size, 2x Screen Width, or High Resolution to ensure legibility of your document on the PSP, and setting the layout to portrait to allow you the ability to both zoom in on the image and pan and scan around the page.

iPSP
iPSP (http://ipsp.kaisakura.com/; $19.99 USD) features the ability to convert PDFs to JPEGs formatted to fit on your PSP, but there aren't as many configuration options available as there are with PDF 2 PSP. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, however, as iPSP does a good job of converting PDFs to JPEGs. There are both Mac and PC versions of the program, but at this time, it looks like only the Mac version supports PDF to JPEG conversion. As an example for this hack, I took a PDF copy of the PSP's manual from the PlayStation site (http://www.playstation.com/manual/pdf/PSP-1001K_1.pdf) and converted it into a folder of sequenced JPEGs for reading on the PSP.

With iPSP, there is no need to locate the folder of converted images and then move them to /PSP/PHOTO/ on your Memory Stick, since the program automatically places the files in the proper location as it converts.

How to Print Documents to PDF?

Since you know that it is possible to view JPEG images on the PSP, and that there are already a spattering of e-books in JPEG format available for the PSP , why not make your own e-books out of documents you have on your computer or can download from the Web?

The easiest way to create e-books is to generate a PDF. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X have different ways of printing your text files directly to PDF, and as PDF is essentially an image format, it is relatively easy to export the different pages of the PDF files into separate JPEG images for viewing on the PSP.

If you're on Windows or Linux, rather than spending all your money on Adobe Acrobat, you can grab a free copy of Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org), which, besides being a fully functional and free alternative to Microsoft Office, has the ability to convert files to PDF. But if the document you want to convert isn't an office or text document, you may still be in luck: if you can print it to a PostScript file, you can use the ps2pdf utility from GhostScript (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/) to create your PDF. To print to a PostScript file, configure a generic PostScript printer that outputs to a file rather than a USB or parallel port.

In order to make the pages of your documents easily readable on your PSP with plenty of zoom, I recommend setting the page settings for your PDF printout to 8 inches by 9 inches with 0.3-inch margins and a nice 12 or 14 point font. I have created a special page setting for my printer in Mac OS X that measures 8 inches by 9 inches with 0.1-inch margins around. In the actual document settings, I choose to give the document 0.3-inch margins. Using Mac OS X's built-in PDF support, I print the document directly to PDF.

How to View the Comics on Your PSP?

Once everything has been copied over, disconnect your PSP from your computer, navigate to Photo Memory Stick, and hit the X button. Select the WEBCOMICS folder that you created and hit the X button to view a list of the comics available. Select one and hit the X button again to open it up.

When you are in the PSP image viewer, make sure that you are set at 100% (hold down the Square button and move the analog stick up and down to zoom in and out), use the analog stick to pan around the image, and use the R trigger to navigate to the next comic or the L trigger to skip back to a previous comic.

Once you do this, it is pretty simple to do again in the future. If you are a coder, consider writing a script of some sort to automate the entire process.

This isn't something that needs to be done on a daily basis, but it is a great way to read the back issues of your favorite web comic when you are away from your PC and nowhere near a wireless access point. It can be a nice relaxing break from an intense Wipeout Pure session.

Also, make sure you check out several of the manga and other comics preformatted for the PSP that are available online.