PSPVideo9: widescreen tweak

It occurs to me that I never did mention my solution for tweaking PSPVideo9 so for those who still haven't figured it out, here's how to make a widescreen video for your PSP.

What is "widescreen?" I thought PSP was already 16:9!
Well, 16:9 is indeed wider than your regular 4:3 home television - it's the standard for HDTV. But it's not "theatrical widescreen." If you watch, say, Lord of the Rings on an HDTV screen - you'll know what I mean - it's still letter-boxed with the black bars even though your television is called a "widescreen television." The pros (folks like Peter Jackson) refer to 2.35:1 as widescreen (where by 1.85:1 is just a home-theatre standard).

Okay - so how do I make a letter-boxed video for my PSP using PSPVideo9?
Well lucky for you and me, there're plenty of helpful folks on the PSPVideo9 message boards. But if you're like me, you're too shy to ask outright - you just realized that those guys assume you know how to tweak the resolution of the encoder.
First, you'll need to pick one of the given presets under Setup - I chose convenient "368x208/29.97fps/768kbps Stereo/128kpbs" in the "Profiles" tab. Click the "New Profile" button to make a copy of this preset and give it a name in the "Profile Name" box.

Now look down: there's a box called "Costum FFMPEG Flags" - type the following in there:

-padtop 26 -padbottom 26

Finally click the "Apply" button. There now you have a copy of that profile - same stuff in it except you've just added 26 pixels of blank bars at the top and another 26 at the bottom.

Wait a minute: now I get an error message!
That's right - the problem now is that PSPVideo9 thinks you're trying to create a video that's 260 pixels high! That's right: the original profile we modified had 368x208. So 26+208+26 = 260 pixels high. Unfortunately, unless I'm some kind of idiot (that was rhetorical) - PSPVideo9 doesn't seem to have a way of editing the original total resolution so you'll need to get down into the actual XML for the rest... and lucky you - I'll tell you exactly how to do it!

Go into your Program Files directory where you installed PSPVideo9. Open the file called "profiles.xml" with Notepad or any plain ASCII text editor. At the bottom will be the newest profile - that is, the widescreen one you created. And it unfortunately still reads

resolution="368x208"

. The solution: change 208 to 156. That means the two bars you added will now sandwich a shorter video (26+156+26=208) - making a total video size back to 368x208 - fits the PSP screen again!

See - that wasn't so hard! Now if only I could figure out where to buy a 1Gb Memory Stick Pro Duo for cheap.