A quick follow up to the troubles I was having converting my DVDs to run on my PSP. The world has changed quite a bit since my 2005 post on making PSP movies. It’s a lot easier to get things running on the PSP with the latest software. Here’s a short set of instructions on how to get the movies converted.

I’m not an expert on all of this, and perhaps there are better ways to do this. If you’re an expert, please chime in below in the comments (especially if you have a better understanding of how the PSP does 2.35:1 display). Also, please do not convert movies you don’t own or violate copyright laws in any way. I’m assuming that this is legal where you are and that you’re following your local laws. If not, don’t follow these instructions. Seriously, follow the laws in your area. I only convert movies I own so I can make them compatible with other devices I own.

iPod users, Handbrake comes with an iPod setting so you should just follow it where you can. You can basically stop reading the instructions below after you have HandBrake started up and just hit Start.

What you need:

You’ll want a reasonably modern Mac. Rule of thumb: the newer the Mac, the faster the conversion. This same process works on my G4 iMac, and it flies on my new Intel-based iMac, for example. I’m assuming you have a DVD drive (just a reader, don’t need a SuperDrive or DVD-writer).

Obviously, you’ll want a PSP or iPod. For the PSP, which is the only device I’m really familiar with, you’ll want the latest firmware which you can download using the built-in software. Doing that is beyond the scope of this article, but you can find resources online. You’ll also need a memory stick to store the movies on for playback on the PSP. I recommend at least a 2 GB card which can store about 2-4 movies and is relatively cheap.

You’ll also want lots of disk space. I have a Western Digital 1 TB My Book Pro II External Hard Drive that’s great for storing both the in process DVDs as well as the final movie files. I use it for more than just videos, though, so you can definitely get away with far less space. I would recommend having at least 20 GB sitting around plus whatever space you want to store the converted movies.

Finally, you’ll want the latest versions of two pieces of software. The first is HandBrake, a very clean, free DVD to MP4 conversion program. Technically, you can probably get away with just HandBrake, but I also recommend getting a copy of MacTheRipper. While the latest release is also free, I strongly recommend donating to the project so you can access the beta versions. For example, I wasn’t able to convert Casino Royale using the released version but the beta already had a workaround for the new RipGuard/ARccOS protection used on that DVD (once again highlighting the futility of these copy protection schemes. More on that later).

Step-by-step instructions:

One you have all of that ready to go, the steps are pretty straightforward. You want to use MacTheRipper to take the data off of the DVD drive and put it somewhere on your hard drive. This is what people refer to as “ripping” the DVD. Then you’ll use HandBrake to convert the movie to a PSP compatible version. Here are the steps:

1. Start up MacTheRipper (MTR) and pop in the disc
2. If the “DISC RCE” box (bottom right of the top half/display part of the app) says anything other than “-CLEAR-”, you’ll need to select the region of your DVD (1 for North America) in the RCE Region box on the bottom right. See the screenshot for more detail.
   
3. If MTR says to follow some other steps, also do what it says. For example, newer Sony DVDs like Casino Royale can only be extracted using “Main Title Only Extraction” which you’ll have to set by going to the Mode tab in MTR.
4. Click Go to start converting the DVD. Remember where you decided to save the extracted files (I’ll refer to them as VOBs from here on).
5. Now that you have your VOBs, take out the DVD.
6. Start up HandBrake
7. In the window that comes up, select DVD Folder/Image and click the browse button. In the next window, find the place where MTR extracted the DVD. For example, MTR generally saves DVDs in the directory you specified as another directory with the name of the DVD. See the screenshot for what I see when I correctly select the GARDEN_STATE DVD.
8. Click Open and that will return you to the main screen.
9. Go to Preferences (under the Handbrake menu) and put the following into the x264 Encoder Advanced Settings Flags box: bframes=3:bime=1:b-rdo=1:direct=auto:level=21:me=umh:mixed-refs=1:no-fast-pskip=1:partitions=all:ref=2:subme=7:threads=1:weightb=1. Not sur what all of that does, but found it on some of the forums and they work well.
10. See this screenshot below to see the settings I use. Note that this is for a 16×9 DVD, not a 2.35:1 DVDs. The back of your DVD case will tell you what kind it is. Basically, the PSP has a resolution of 480×272. Make sure your output matches those dimensions. You can change the output resolution by clicking the Picture Settings button. The height should automatically adjust when you reduce the width to 480. Make sure the height is 272.
    

    If you try to set the width to 480 and the height only comes out at 208 (with Keep aspect ratio checked), you have a 2.35:1 DVD. All you need to do is set the Crop setting to custom and make them all 0. Here’s a screenshot:

    

    Hope that helps eliminate some questions. Doing the math, though, I think this squishes the movie a tiny bit horizontally (a height of 208 would make the width 489 or so, not 480). Anyone have any suggestions here? I’ll have to try other settings to see what makes the PSP happy but keeps the ratio right.

11. Note the other settings. I use 2-pass encoding and an 800kbps average bitrate because I want decent quality, but that does add to the encoding time and file size respectively. With these settings, the 2h24m Casino Royale came out to 962.5MB, which would be tight on most 1GB cards. I’m still playing around with different bitrates, and I’ve found folks online claiming good quality as low as 600kbps. I’ll update this as I try more settings.
12. Another hint: Change the output filename to something you’ll recognize. For example, with TV shows I include the episode title or something else.
13. You can hit start and then walk away for a while. I actually click the enable queue checkbox bottom left and do conversions in batches. In other words, I rip multiple DVDs to my drive, then queue them all up in HandBrake as I go to bed. By the time I come home from work the next day, they’re done. I delete the VOBs from my drive and start ripping the next set of DVDs while I work at my home computer. Lather, rinse, repeat.

That’s basically it. You should end up with a nice .mp4 file that will run on your PSP. Let me know if you have other questions or comments. I’m willing to help with as much as I know.

I have to admit that this week’s announcement from Apple (while impressive) left me disappointed on one major front. I was really expecting Apple to do something clever with the form factor of the iPod Video in order to get a larger screen on there. Yes, I know it’s physically larger than the standard iPod Photo screen, but I’m talking another inch or so each way, perhaps in a widescreen orientation.

I expected I would be envious of the new iPod when I compared it to my PSP, but the screen size is so important to me that I don’t regret having the PSP at all. The device can play games and music, I have an iPod anyway to carry the bulk of my music collection, and I know how to take DVD films and dump them to the PSP. Apple also wasn’t able to seal a deal for movies beyond the Pixar shorts that they got. If they’re able to do that, I’ll reevaluate, but without a legal, legit, and easy way to get mainstream films onto the iPod, it’s not quite good enough. Movies for the PSP (on their UMD format) may be a little overpriced, but the availability of titles makes it easy to grab a movie for a trip.

Which leads me to the next point for this post, a review of how the PSP did on my trip out to California last week. I had a number of movies on UMD and movies from my DVD collection with me on the trip. I ended up watching several on the trip. Overall, the PSP was a great portable video player. I was able to watch nearly two whole movies without running out of juice on both trips. The only reason I wasn’t able to finish the second movie was that the flight was too short. My only major complaint is that the sound level on the recordings was too low. The PSP has a UMD volume feature that boosts the audio to compensate, but it wasn’t enough. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the sound level on DVDs are also set very low. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s universal enough to make me believe that it offers some advantage in dynamic range or something. The UMDs seem similarly “quiet.” Games, on the other hand, are nice and loud. I actually had the captioning on so I could understand some of the quieter dialog. It’s just a problem on planes, really. When I used it while camping, it was perfectly loud enough.

I mostly watched movies I had already seen, but I did get one movie for my birthday from Heidi that I hadn’t watched yet. Based on a recommendation from my sister, she got me Crash. I really liked this movie. The ensemble cast delivers great performances across the board. The story is pretty simple. As the events unfold, we start seeing how racism plays into the lives of all of the characters (good and bad). It’s the story that makes this a great movie. Good actors and a good story… funny how that makes for a good movie.

If you liked Traffic, you’ll like this movie. Like Traffic, the writer has worked in some portions that just kick you in the gut. It’s not a happy movie, really. I think that’s part of what makes me like it. It’s not a happy ending. There’s some authenticity in that and not in a contrived way.

Rating: 8/10

I think Microsoft has finally figured out the gaming market and Sony has missed the boat, officially. Here’s what I mean: Engadget distributed a cameraphone shot of the XBox 360 from the launch party. Nothing new if you’ve been following this, but it’s evidence that Microsoft has dealt with some issues that plagued the original XBox. The new XBox is smaller, better designed and by all reports quieter. The hardware specs are better than the PS2 by a huge margin, and in general it looks to be a great console in the making. And they got rid of the hard drive. I might lift my Microsoft ban for this console, that’s how good it is.

Good hardware only takes you so far (look at the original XBox). The games matter more, of course, and Microsoft has figured out the games. More importantly, they’ve figured out the advertising. The new XBox Live commercial for Forza Motorsports is absolutely perfect for the game. This commercial explains why people game online. It’s short, it’s sweet, and it it’s memorable. Sony hasn’t had one of these in a while.

Last item: I’ve been looking high and low for the Logitech PSP case. I’ve looked EVERYWHERE, even dragging Heidi and my Mom to both malls by my parents’ place to see if they had it in stock. Sold out everywhere. Sounds good for the PSP, right? Wrong. Every store that carries PSPs still has them in stock. The Best Buy in West Hartford has a pallet of them sitting there. That’s just the stores that carry the PSP, by the way. No PSPs in Target (carries the PS2, the XBox, and the Gamecube) or Sears or a few other places I’ve checked. I haven’t checked Wal Mart.

Accessories and games are hard to find, too, though I think that will get better over time. I’m curious to see if the PS3 will fall behind the XBox 360 to the same extent the original XBox did versus the PS2. They’ll have about the same head start and I think better market acceptance. Could be an interesting few years in the game market. Microsoft may be about to get something (outside of Windows and Office) right. About freaking time.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my PSP but I don’t think it’s in the same market as the XBox 360. I also don’t think taking a year off to build this thing is going to stop people this winter from dumping hundreds of dollars in a game console upgrade. The curious thing will be to see if XBox Live does as well as many expect considering it still costs money. I wish they would just roll the costs of Live into the game prices…

I finally got a movie onto the PSP that played with the sound intact and everything. Amazing, huh? My process was simple. I used MacTheRipper to get the movie off the DVD, using Title Only extraction. I then used FFMPEGX to encode the video using the built-in PSP profile. A couple of things to know:

• PSP doesn’t like the NTSC Film frame rate. Leave it as NTSC (29.97).
• Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones (AOTC) is 2:22 long. It wouldn’t fit on a 512MB card unless I reduced the audio encoding down to 64-bit and 24000Hz sampling. The Incredibles, which I haven’t gotten to work yet, did fit with 128-bit, 48kHz sampling. It came out to about 390-420MB depending on the options.
• I’m not so thrilled with the video quality of AOTC. The edges of people are blurry and not exactly what I expected. The Incredibles encoded much sharper, but then it is animated… no hair to deal with, for example.
• The Incredibles hasn’t worked yet. Something about the multiangle stuff is causing my tools to barf. I’ve tried both YadeX and MacTheRipper to rip it and both FFMPEGX and iPSP to encode it. Both have had major issues with the audio sync. The closest I got was using MacTheRipper to demux the VOB file (essentially splitting the video and audio into two separate file). I then encoded with FFMPEGX, but the audio was out of sync by a smidge. Enough to be annoying, though… I’m going to try to fix it using Sync Hole but I’m not holding my breath. I’m going to try some more things before I just give up and wait for Disney to release it on UMD.
• I’ve yet to try iPSP’s full screen mode. Sony would like people to encode video at 320×240 rather than at the full resolution of the PSP (which is real widescreen, 16×9). People have figured out how to encode movies at the full resolution and tweak the headers so that the PSP will play it (clever people). The movies take up more room, so that might be a problem for me with the 512MB card, but it’s worth giving it a shot with a shorter flick.
• The subtitles didn’t make it through in AOTC where they should’ve in regular English playback (for example, when they’re speaking in some alien language). It’s odd, but I think I may have not set the option on the encoding. That’s something else to play with.
• This stuff is SLOOOOOOOW on my iMac. At home, ATOC took about 270 minutes to encode (4 hours, 30 minutes). On a dual-G5, I’ve seen it encode in 2 hours or so. This is using two-pass encoding with Trellis quantization enabled. I’m not including the time it took to rip the movie from the DVD (on both computers it took under an hour, probably close to 30 minutes).
• iPSP is SLOOOOOOOW, much slower than FFMPEGX. Not sure why, but I’ll try to get some comparison times to put up.

I’ll update with more information as I get it. It’s nice having a portable video player.

Update: I updated my process in this new post on 5-6-2007.

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…

You can find the resources I’ve found on encoding video for the PSP on OS X at my del.icio.us page. I’ll be adding more and posting here if/when I have any success.

Update: I’ve put more notes and findings on this page.

Nick Bradbury of FeedDemon goes over how to download podcasts to the PSP. Pretty nifty. I’m sure an AppleScript could be written to do the same with NetNewsWire.

So, the original plan was to buy the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) and then immediate flip it on eBay. Then I saw the little sticker on the box that said it came with a copy of SpiderMan 2, full length and only modified to fit the PS screen. And I thought, hmmm… wonder how good that is?

So, I kept it and opened it up and popped in the movie. Then my jaw dropped. The video is pretty damn good, just shy of DVD quality to my eyes. Battery life is about 3-5 hours, which should be enough to watch a whole movie or two on a cross country flight. It uses normal headphones, but uses a proprietary disc format called UMD. The guys at the store mentioned that movies can be downloaded to the Memory Stick, but I suspect I’d need a 512MB MemoryStick Duo to make that remotely useful for a feature film. But, the interesting thing is that I can pop in Duo’s from my camera (not that I have Duo’s in my camera, just regular MemoryStick PROs). On my list of things to figure out is whether the PSP can act as a host for the camera, allowing me to look at the pictures on the brighter/bigger PSP screen.

The game play is pretty solid. I’ve played around with one before, but it was a golf game that really didn’t push the controls around much. This time around, I got Need for Speed: Underground Rivals to push this baby around and jam on the controls a bit. All I can say is nice job, Sony. The device is comfortable and fits well in my hands. The only complaint I have is that the analog controller is a bit odd and will take some time to get used to. I understand why they didn’t model it after the typical analog controllers found on game controllers, so I’m not criticizing the decision.

Next major feature: It supports WiFi out of the box, but I had some issues getting on my network. In fact, this was the biggest headache of all. I had it resolved within 30 minutes, if that says anything, but still I’m disappointed in the process here. The wireless connection software requires some specific settings on the router and unfortunately, the errors only come back with cryptic codes.

For example, my wireless network is set to use shared key security (WEP is enabled). Well, apparently, the PSP requires open network security. The error message that informed me of this was generic and only gave me this code as a specific reason: 80410D09 . Helpful, huh? After I Googled around for that, I fixed it and tried again. New error: 80110482 . WTF? While poking around, I retried the connection and magically it worked. Turns out the error has something to do with not getting a DHCP response (getting an IP address from the router’s DHCP server). I think I may have tried to test it too soon after changing the settings on the router… it was probably still trying to restart.

I still have yet to actually try to get on the Internet. Need For Speed was having trouble finding other drivers to race against online, but I’m not exactly sure why. Something else to look into.

So, I’m pretty much floored at this point. I think the move of including a movie instead of a full game is brilliant because it gets people thinking about the device differently that the Nintendo stuff that we’re all so familiar with. In fact, I’m more excited right now about using this as a cheap portable movie player and photo viewer than I am about anything else.

What will be interesting is whether movies will be available from the other studios aside from the Sony labels. Quite honestly, I haven’t been paying attention to this space at all. I’m sure the answer could be had for a bit of Googling, but this is a device that will do better with some openness. Of course, they could always go the iTMS route and stick with allowing people to download DRM’ed movies to their computers by leveraging the Duo’s. Mark Cuban (yeah, that Mark Cuban) wrote a while back about how he was able to watch DVD quality feature films from a USB flash drive. In fact, I walk around most days with at least a 1GB flash drive in my pocket. It’s how I transport work between home and office and music back and forth (wish iTunes had a “sync” feature).

Sony could use this device as Apple has used the iPod and iTMS if they can get the breadth of video content. It would be a fascinating move, especially if they could offer different formats for different devices in the home. I’d rather have a higher quality download for my TV than I would for the PSP. This would be very cool if they can pull this off.

I thought about the implications of this as I was getting over my initial excitement and wondered about the benefits of openness vs. proprietary standards. Most technologists would reflexively tell you that being open or using an open standard is better than using a proprietary spec. Yet today, we have a couple of examples where proprietary is beating open hands down: the iPod/iTMS combo and the video game market.

It seems to me that the maturity of a market is a defining characteristic of when openness matters. With the web, for example, we’re heading toward more standardization and openness than we’ve had since the very early days. Around the Netscape era, everyone was happy to use the Netscape extensions (blink tag, anyone?) because that was the only way to get new features. They were driving the market. As the market matures, we’re seeing more thought being applied to creating standards before implementing them. XHTML and CSS specs are now both ahead of the implementations, meaning that the road map for browser developers is out there… no need to make up proprietary stuff.

The online music store market is still relatively young, obviously, which is why iTMS seems to do so well. People are just happy to have a place to actually go shop and get the music they want at a price they can deal with that they’re willing to accept the restrictions of having the best portable MP3 player and a very good selection of music. If Sony were to get into the downloadable market via their online media store, I think they might enjoy the same advantages as Apple has in the music space. They’re first and they’re making it work. The gadget is amazing, and the use cases are there. I kinda hope this makes it.

(while I was writing, I decided to do a quick Google… looks like the mothership is going to release some movies on UMD, but they’re the only non-Sony shop to have signed up. I think this is Sony’s major disadvantage, if I can call it that… they’re a competitor with people they need to partner with, and I wonder if that makes it harder for them to make deals?)