I have owned a PSP for several years. It is a fabulous machine with real impressive hardware and possibilities. The big problem is that Sony tries to look in the owners so the potential of the hardware is not there. There has been way around that by installing cracked firmware. The main obstacle has been the boundaries around video. It has not been possible to look at full resolution videos without running third part software which requires a cracked firmware, i.e. using http://jonny.leffe.dnsalias.com/
Now I have upgraded my PSP to firmware 5.50 GEN-D and finally I can drop movies into the /VIDEO folder and look at them in full resolution. So finally I can look at mythtv recordings on my way to the work or my kids can look at movies in the back of the car when we are travelling. Now it time to buy a second PSP.
Converting movies into a PSP accepted format is rather painful. I have not find any good solution running on linux. I have fiddled several hours with handbrake, avidemux, commandline driven ffmepg and PSPVC. The only program that makes the converting somewhat painless, just time consuming, is PSPVC on windows. The main problem on linux seems to be that ffmpeg is broken and need to be recompiled.
My recommendation to Sony is to open up their excellent solutions. Right of my mind I know four failures Sony have made because of their vendor look in strategy:
- Betamax video format, technically much better then VHS but closed. Betamax died and crappy VHS conquered the world.
- MiniDisc, an excellent technology which Sony refused to open up until it was to late. If they would have opened it would replaced floppys and killed Compact Cassets much earlier. Probably portable MP3 players would be postponed a year or two.
- PSP, if Sony would have opened it with SDKs and open APIs Apples POD products would not exist or be a margin product.
- PS3, with a open hardware platform so a real Linux solution could run, not the hybrid they have now, Sony would own the HTPC market. With the power of the PS3 and possibility to install for example mythtv, XBMC and other media solutions they would sell alot more PS3 and when the PS3 is there, several games would be sold aswell.
So Sony if you want to get richer, open up!
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
One Response to “PSP update makes it finally useful”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
January 24th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Thanks for sharing great artcles, I will keep coming back to check your site for this kinds of article. Thanks!