The PSP really looks like a winner. In addition to playing the game I mentioned last time, I’ve tried the two grand experiments on my list: play a video game again other humans (online) and get a feature film onto a MemoryStick. I’ve had mixed success with both.

First off, the video game. After playing Need For Speed for a while, I got bored with racing around in a circle. It’s fun for a while and I’ll probably go back to playing it again, but I needed to get online against people with a game that has more action. So, off I went to Best Buy to get another game. After poking around and being shocked at the price of the games (some as much as $49.99!), I settled on Twisted Metal Head On (TMHO), part of the Twisted Metal franchise. The game is pretty much the old Atari game Combat with really cool graphics and more than just a boring square to shoot at your opponents. Seriously, you can just download BZFlag and imagine it with really cool graphics, cars instead of tanks, and different types of tanks/cars instead of the one-tank-to-rule-them-all. That’s TMHO.

The gameplay is fast, the graphics are beautiful and the soundtrack is pretty good. The best part of the game, though, is that you can play online using the PSP’s built in wireless. I had few problems getting online yesterday, though I did hit the 80110482 error a few times. I just re-tried and voila, on the net. The online play is smooth, at least as good as playing online on the computer. A few blips of lag today, but yesterday was as smooth as can be.

There’s something a bit odd about playing an online game (and I mean concentrating and really playing it) while laying on the couch. You’re just not supposed to do that! I swear I would sort of realize what I was doing between rounds and think, man, two years ago I would never have expected to be able to do this. To have a screen with such great graphics, good sound, enough battery power to run the hardware PLUS a wireless Internet connection running at full speed for hours of gaming? You kidding me? This is f’ing awesome.

OK, so I’m a big fan of the wireless connectivity. Let’s move on to the next big experiment, my own DVDs on my PSP. While at Best Buy, I picked up a copy of The Incredibles and a new 512MB MemoryStick Pro Duo card. My goal was to get The Incredibles onto that MemoryStick and playing on my PSP. I ended up with mixed results.

After a bit of poking around the Internet, I found that the process to encode video on a Mac for the PSP had already been documented by a number of uber-geeks that had the Japanese release and more video knowledge than I. So, it was just a matter of finding and noting them to make a list of the software I’d need and the steps to follow. All of this stuff is freeware or very inexpensive shareware, so luckily that was no burden. Unfortunately, all of this stuff was freeware or shareware and so I ran into some cryptic options.

I ended up using YadeX and ffmpegx to do the conversion. I eventually plan on replacing YadeX with MacTheRipper, but for now both work about the same. ffmpegx has a preset for the PSP, but I tweaked a few things along the way. I’ll document that later once I have a complete success story (and can eliminate my tweaks as causes for my current problem).

After a LOOOONG time (I left the encoding running overnight on my 1.25Ghz G4 iMac), I got a copy of the feature down to around 340MB, more than small enough to fit on the MemoryStick. The audio kind of sucked (32-bit/24khz sampling), but it was hard to really tell with the speakers. The video was a little blurry to me (side effect of most of these compressors, at least to me), but in general it was very nice and very hard to notice. The video was smooth and fluid.

The problem was that the audio seemed to be almost 20-30 seconds behind the feature. I don’t know why or how or what is causing it to be this way, but it’s in sync for the first few minutes (basically the entire TV interview segment at the beginning of the film), but after that the audio and video seem to lurch a bit and then they’re out of whack the rest of the way. Frustrating. I tried re-encoding a bunch of times today while at work, but with no success (luckily, my dual G5 at work only takes an hour or so to encode from the VOB).

I’m still investigating, but this may be beyond my feeble knowledge of 24 hours. I’ll post the steps I followed for a successful encoding if I get it to work. Perhaps I’ll try a different movie…