PSP video questions

Chumpski

I am thinking of buying a psp today. I want it at the moment anyway mainly for playing video to make my daily bus journeys (hour each way) bearable. Theres not any games on it at the moment that interest me. GTA kind of interests me but i dont want to play a game ive played 3 times before on the PS2. Its good but not that good!

Beside the point though as ive a few questions..

Most importantly, Is it possible to convert DVDs, .divx, .xVid, .avi and other video formats to be able to play on the PSP (as the UMD movies are expensive)? What software should i buy/download to do this?

Ive noticed the screen is quite small. Is it annoying watching videos on it as its small?

Am i crazy for buying it just for videos?

Cheers

delly

I think its grand for watching video but theres a lot better out there if thats all your going to use it for. I'm sure that you could get a hard disk player for the same money when you take into account the price of memory cards.

exzantia

Chumpski wrote:

Most importantly, Is it possible to convert DVDs, .divx, .xVid, .avi and other video formats to be able to play on the PSP (as the UMD movies are expensive)? What software should i buy/download to do this?

Yes it possible to convert them to the PSP's Mpeg4 format. To do this you *can* pay some of your hard earned money to random people or you can just download one for free, up to you!

Chumpski wrote:

Ive noticed the screen is quite small. Is it annoying watching videos on it as its small?

Simply put, no. The screen may not be all that big but it does have a nice high resolution. Any UMD movies you get will look as crisp and sharp as they would from your DVD's. The PSP also has a nice way of remembering where you were on the disc even if you power off or take it out to play other things. Any divx's will look as good as the origional encoding was, if they looked good to begin with they will stay good...

Chumpski wrote:

Am i crazy for buying it just for videos?

Slightly, on the one had it is small, portable and if you want to do more than play vidoes it will happily let you. It is also much nicer to haul about than a portable DVD player!
To be honest I would be quite surprised if you couldn't get some use out of the PSP outside of movies, but even if you don't I still think that it is worth serious consideration.

Chumpski

No id definetly play games on it as well and id use the music player as well. Whether id play lots of games on it or not depends on the games available.

Any recomendations for this converting software free and retail, preferably free though?

exzantia

I don't really have any recomendations, the last time I did it was just after I got the unit and the software I had was Japanese... but a quickgoogle search turned this up : http://www.pspvideo9.com/

I don't watch videos on mine becuase I get travel sick and watching movies on the go is not for me. It however is handy to shove in a UMD and play it if your lying in bed not sleeping as I so often do...

Cabelo

I use PSPvideo9 and its been epic. My Sam&Max suffered some sound staggering but apart from that she's a beauty.

madmoe

PSP Video 9 is a good choice......even though it takes an age to convert stuff

Apparently someone is working on a player for the PSP that will allow avi\'s to be played without having to convert them!!

www.ps2nfo.com is a great site for info.