If this is your first time here, why not consider subscribing to my RSS feed?

First Blog Post on the Sony PSP

Posted on February 28, 2006
Filed Under Daily Links |

Sometimes you just have to thank Ebay - winning an auction for a Sony Playstation Portable for a ridiculously low price all thanks to a main auction picture that made the device look like it had a smashed screen. As you can see, it quite clearly isn’t.

Sony PSP Deception?

So the trip to the USA now has some entertainment. The PSP is a little bit of a diversion away from the normal portable games devices (I’m treating the N-Gage as a phone with games, not a games device that has a phone here) in that it is designed to be connected to a home computer to transfer multimedia onto the device…. You do need to make sure you have a memory card though. The package contains a 32mb stick which can hold all your game data, but you need to have something larger to make good use of the machine. I picked up a 1gig card on Amazon for just over £35.

Being able to drop over picture and audio is pretty straightforward - the manual points out the correct file structure on the card. And your computer can see the file structure so away you go and drop in what you need. The user interface, Sony’s XMB (Cross Media Bar) is a nice presentation. The most important information is always in the middle of the screen, with the hierarchy of icons running left to right, rather than the more traditional up and down - which make sense given the 16:9 widescreen display.

Video is another matter, but it’s not that difficult. Naturally the PSP is going to need a specific format that it can play, and the chances that your DVD rip or torrent are int hat exact format are pretty slim. So the first bit of freeware for the PSP on Windows arrives in the form of PSPVideo9. You Point it your video, give it the conversion options (such as the level of compression of the soundtrack, the aspect ratio of the output, and a bundle of other scary things I’ve not played with yet) and let it crunch away. It’s as close to one click conversion as I think you could get. Sony should drive a dump-truck of money up to the author and bundle this with every PSP out there.

The journey time from my place in Edinburgh to getting picked up at Los Angeles International is around 18 hours, So I’m loaded up with a number of films and tv for the flight on Thursday, including Life on Mars, Wallace and Gromit, and Airplane!

Airplane!

I know there’s a Sony PSP Media Manager software out there, but I find it frankly offensive that they want to charge me more (another $20) to get the most out of the machine. PSPVideo9 handles all the video conversion needs, while the MiniDisc Manager (Sonic Stage) will happily do all the moving and playlisting for the audio player section of the PSP. Okay yes it means using the highly efficient ATRAC format and not the more common MP3 files, but as most of my collection is ATRAC accessible for the MiniDisc, that’s not as much of a problem to me as it is to other people.

Finally, it is a games system, and the titles I have for it are certainly jaw dropping compared to even the Nintendo GBA/DS system that launched three years ago. I’ll probably talk a bit more about them over the next two weeks (or more likely when I get back to the UK) but for reference I’ve got World Snooker Challenge 2005, Luminies, and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. Any donations of other titles greatly appreciated.

Now, does anyone need to hire a PSP Blogger?

Comments

One Response to “First Blog Post on the Sony PSP”

  1. TANKERx on February 28th, 2006 16:12

    Hi,

    Isn’t that the Transformers (’Robots in disguise’) logo? I only ever had two little ones (more of a Star Wars lad in my years), so not too sure.

Leave a Reply