PSP Video 9 - the next essential conversion tool?

If you read my other blog you may notice FusionAce had a pretty heavy day today... lots to folks to speak to and catching up on work and such. What I didn't mention over in the F-A office-blog is that the PSP was a huge hit for all my visitors. Starfish was suitably impressed (you'd think that an avid gamer like him would've been up-to-speed with the latest gadgets... he's not). Even U.D.G. took one look at it and said, "hey - I approve ...make a lot more sense than that DVD player you wanted to put in your car!" ^o^;

Came home eagerly to try something new: PSPvideo9
This is a tiny little freeware app used for converting typical AVI files into the appropriate format recognized by the PSP's video hardware. The result? Download the usual DiVx file of whatever, watch it on the go.

The downside to all this: well, the files are going to be media files regardless of conversion. That is, you'll be buying a rather large Memory Stick Duo at some point in the near future. The standard 32mb card that comes bundled with the PSP is just enough for... oh about 5 minutes of video give or take.

The app itself is pretty straight-forward and is about as user-friendly as possible. With a little bit of tweaking during setup, it'll even copy your files over to your PSP when the encoding is done.

That said, it does have its own shortcomings. The first I encountered was that the interface did not allow me to tweak the final resolution of the video. Presets are great for 4:3 sizes and 16:9 but true widescreen was nowhere to be found. With the help of previous forum-users, I pieced together how to edit FFMPEG custom flags in the XML file (the explanations on the forum don't seem to apply to the current version of PSPVideo9).

Am I happy with the result? Sure... will I keep using this app? Probably. Would I recommend the app? Yup. Do you have a PSP for yourself? you should... ^_^