Want To Watch Movies On Your PSP?

Posted by Nick Niesen on October 26th, 2010

The Sony PSP was originally developed for playing cutting edge video games. This is what the PSP can do best. It has got superb display and sound quality and a media called UMD (Universal Media Disc) for mass storage.

But besides playing games the developers had another cool application for the console in mind: Watching movies and video clips. The display of the PSP has the perfect 'wide-screen' format to display current movies in their full wide-screen format. It turns out that the resolution of the PSP display is able to render movies in a quality that you normally wouldn't expect from a small device like this.

If you have even been on a flight were people left and right of you just watch the board movie you know how it is if you take you PSP and watch your favorite Star Trek episode. You know how good it feels to get all these envious looks. Some people may pretend they are not watching - others will openly ask you: 'Hey, I didn't know you could watch movies like that with a PSP - I bought this for my son but I thought it was just for video games.' So many times I have heard this or a similar statement.

In general people are surprised by the quality of the image displayed by the PSP. If you hold the PSP in your hand you get a sufficient details level to enjoy an entire movie.

There are two ways to watch movies on your PSP: One is to buy movies on UMDs. These are available in most electronic shops where they sell PSP games. The discs are even smaller than the old mini-CDs that the record industry tried to establish.

However, you cannot buy all movies on UMD. Especially TV-series are not usually found on UMDs. Also, if you already have your favorite movies at home on a DVD you don't want to buy them again. Especially since the price of a UMD can be even higher than the DVD.

The second option that is very trendy right now is to download PSP movies from the net or convert your existing DVDs and transfer the movie to the PSP.

Unfortunately UMDs are not writable so the only place where you can store a movie on a PSP is the memory stick. The memory stick was designed to hold saved games, but Sony quickly realized that people wanted to put all kinds of things on the PSP like music and videos. So now memory sticks with 1GB or more are easily available and affordable.

For watching movie you should have a memory stick of at least 1GB. Anything smaller will not give you're the full length or quality for a movie.

Fortunately there is software available that automatically converts a DVD into the right format and transfers it to the DVD.