All Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs reports

Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs

Jon tries to make a movie for his PSP

Here’s the way it should work. You pick a source file, say a DVD, or maybe a WMV or AVI. You jam in your memory stick, tell the program where it is, or if it’s a really smart program, what it is—you let the program find it, and press Go.

You can’t do that for a zillion reasons. Some of the reasons are all the damn file formats, other reasons are the source locations (CDs, USB memories, HDDs, web, etc.), then there are all the output formats, and finally the output media.

Several companies produce “DVD” burning and copying programs and just assume the users are so unsophisticated they won’t know what they have in their computers or where else to get things, and that all they want to do is make DVDs for grandma. Sure, there may be folks like that out there, and maybe we’d all like to be computer un-savvy Mac users, where it just works (provided you’re willing to do what Apple wants you to do), but the majority of PC users are touch technophiles, at least the ones who are brave enough to venture into video land. So don’t dumb it down for us, we get it or we wouldn’t be here.

With that chip on my shoulder, and the failed efforts of trying five other programs, I ventured once again into the dark forests of trying to make a movie for my PSP that I could load onto the PSP’s memory stick—something all PSP users are going to have to learn since the UMD is going away as a source for movies (overpriced as it was).

Figure 1. Media player users. (Source: CEA)

Intervideo’s DVD Copy4

The Intervideo DVD Copy 4 box sure reads well, so I installed it. I clicked on Source (Step 1)—its default is the DVD drive. Second choice (for a source) is My Videos. Clicked on it, and it reported, “This location does not contain supported content. Please try another location.” Hmmm, in that location I have three .mpg files, a .wmv file, a .mp4 file, and a .vsp file. I guess it’s looking for VOB files. That’s what I mean about the programmers thinking we users are too stupid to deal with this kind of activity, but then, I do feel kinda stupid right now.

Ready to transcode DVD to mp4

I found the little folder icon to the far right of Source and Target. Now that’s helpful, and it allows one to actually pick something other than the defaults. Then I learned that after a conversion from something (say MPEG-2, like those found on a DVD) is done, there will be two output files for each single loaded file. One is the .mp4 video file, playable with QuickTime on PC, another is a .thm file. Both of them are necessary for PSP. The two files are in the same main title, for example, if your original file is “test.avi,” after the conversion you will get two files: “test.mp4” and “test.thm”.

I loaded a copy-able DVD to see if I could do anything with this program. Using the Menu icon in the upper right, I selected Tools and copy disk (DVD) to hard disk. It began the process, I watched the little blue bar work its way across the progress window, not very fast considering I’ve got a fancy 8x Sony DL DVD R/W drive. Time to check email and send out some jokes.

With the email taken care of, I checked the status and now I had a DVD movie copied to My Documents.

Well, Intervideo DVD Copy 4 didn’t produce a .thm file, at least not one the XP search engine could find on my system. But, supposedly, .thm files are not required but add a finishing touch. These files are thumbnail files used when you navigate through your video files on PSP.

OK, so if I don’t really need a .thm, why can’t I see the mp4 video on my PSP? When I search the PSPS it says no videos found.

“I’m not having a very nice Memorial Day,” I said to the cat, who yawned in my face. Whooee, cat breath is like a shot of ammonia, that’ll wake you up.

Learning more than I want to know

For the PSP to find videos on your memory stick, the files must be stored in a specific location. Each card must have a directory in the root folder called MP_Root with a subdirectory 100MNV01.

My PSP memory stick has such a directory, and the mp4 file is, as it should be, in it. So what’s wrong, what’s missing? Where did I go wrong?

Figure 2. The PSP sees the transcoded movie’s .thm file. (Photo: JPR)

But I was encouraged; this was as close as I’ve gotten in this quest, so I re-booted and restarted the program—we are going to have some damn shiny cars. Actually, I decided to go back to benchmarking Vista.

Patience, Grasshopper, patience. Leaving the machine alone (actually forgetting about it) until the chime sounds, a mere 2 hours and 22 minutes later, I found the file had converted and I had a new M4V0_0.mp4. I clicked on it and Nero came up and played the file on my PC, so I had a real transcoded .mp4 file, whoopee! But when I tried to open it with QuickTime I got another Atom error message. Puh. But wait, this machine has an old version of QT: 6.5.2.

Now it gets interesting

I quickly tried to run the movie on the PSP, but it just continued to report No Video Files.

Then I discovered from looking it up in Hacking the PSP (by Auri Rahimzaseh and published by Wiley) that the PSP requires a file name structure of M4Vxxxxx.mp4. Well, now, that was easy to fix. I tried it again with QT, and bingo, it played, but without the sound. Hmmm. So I tried it with the Nero player and it played with the sound. Oh boy. I downloaded the latest version of QT (7.1) and tried it, and lo and behold, the file played with audio.

Then I tried playing it on the PSP. Now I didn’t get the no videos found message—hot doggie, I was getting excited. This time it tried and then reported, “This video cannot be played.”

One more thing to try. I connected the PSP, with its memory stick installed with the .mp4 file on it, and connected it to my faster HP nw8240 laptop workstation with the latest QT codec 7.0.4 and it ran with sound. Let me repeat that. The file is on the memory stick, the memory stick is in the PSP. The PSP is connected via USB to my PC, and the file runs in QT on my PC—but not on the PSP.

What have we learned so far?

Quite a few things, all of them the hard way.

1. Transcoding takes a very long time, longer than the movie time.

2. Intervideo’s DVD Copy 4 does not create a correct PSP file name, or .thm file.

3. Version 6 and older of QuickTime won’t play the audio of an mp4 file, but version 7.0 and later will.

4. The PSP doesn’t like it, any of it.

Figure 3. Trinity is in (the PSP). (Photo: JPR)

But, I still wanted the movie on my PSP, so I reverted to a popular program, PSP Homebrew 9, a shareware program that works (http://www.pspvideo9.com/homebrew/—if you use it, make a $20 donation). DVD 4 made a 367-MByte .mp4 file and no .thm file. PSPVideo 9 made a 336-MByte .mp4 file and a 7-KByte .thm file. And it worked!

Before using PSPS Homebrew 9, I tried Rapiz PSP converter and found it too difficult to use. There are several programs that claim to be end-to-end DVD to PSP, or even “any file (AVI, MPEG, WMV, DV, etc.) to MPEG-4, PSP-compatible), such as Mobile Media Maker (PSP), ImTOO Mpeg2 Mpeg4 Converter 2.1, PowerDirector 5 from Cyberlink, Pinnacle’s Studio AV/DV version 9, and as well as various freeware utilities for transcoding DVD VOB files to mp4 (e.g., Lenogo DVD Movie to PSP Converter, Cucusoft DVD to PSP Converter, PQDVD PSP Movie Creator, Xilisoft DVD to PSP Converter, PSP X Play, and others). We’ve tried many (not all) of them, and couldn’t get them to work as advertised for one reason or another.

Conclusions

You can do it; you can copy DVDs and other files to the memory stick of the PSP. And, it seems you can do it best with a shareware program. We had to destroy the copy we made because it was from a protected DVD, and we have the (paid-for) movie so we didn’t need a copy for our PSP.

Content will still be the problem

You can still buy a UMD version of Matrix Reloaded for $18 at Amazon and other places, which is too expensive for what you’re getting considering you can get a legal wide-screen DVD version with 5.1 sound for $10.

The PSP is possibly the ultimate personal media player, and it’s a shame Sony crippled it with stupid marketing practices that make it too expensive to buy disks. That just drives the kids to make illegal copies. If you’re traveling in the U.S., most airports have UMD rentals, Inmotion being the largest purveyors of such items (DVDs, UMDs, games, and players).

There are even holders for the PSP that fit over the seat in front of you (for cars and maybe airplanes), so you don’t have to hold the player to watch it.

But with the studios abandoning UMD, the only content for it will be either rips or DviX stuff. Not a very bright future for such a great machine.

Who cares?

Well, according to research released from the CEA, The Future of Portable Entertainment Devices, one in three adults who use the Internet, or 54.1 million Americans, owns a portable digital media device, and more than half (54%) plan to buy one over the next year.

Listening to music is currently the most popular activity on such devices (94%). However, while only 15% of players shipped in 2005 could play video, that percentage is expected to double this year, for the estimated 28 million portable players that will ship in 2006.

“Digital media players that can house entire libraries of digital audio and video content have remained a niche market until now. Results of this study indicate that this trend is gaining critical mass,” said Steve Koenig, CEA’s senior manager of industry analysis. The study also found that less than half of portable device owners currently purchase content for their devices online, but 71% plan to buy music or video online in the coming year.