Tag: psp

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When the GO!ng gets tough, the tough get going…

Okay, in a previous post I mentioned how I quite liked the GO!VIEW service for the PSP from Sony and Sky.

Having now used the service for two months I have unsubscribed.

I think I would have probably unsubscribed last month, but the service wouldn’t let me so I was automatically subscribed for another month.

So what’s the problem, it’s not as if I don’t watch “rented” video?

Well let’s see?

Was it easy to find what you wanted?

Basically yes, the Flash based interface was a little annoying and a little too clever for it’s own good, but for most purposes it was fine.

Were the files good quality?

Yes, as I said previously:

The quality of the Doctor Who video was quite poor, almost VHS quality, however I was more impressed with the quality of the Hustle video which was (in my opinion) as good as the quality I have managed converting EyeTV Freeview recordings.

Was it easy to move the files to the PSP?

Yes, and when you consider I was doing this on parallels on my iMac, I had added a extra layer of complexity.

So why have you unsubscribed then?

To be brutally honest, the one reason I have unsubscribed is that there is no new content.

In the last two months, there have been no additions to the content line-up. So we have Hustle season 1, but no seasons 2, 3 or even 4! We have Spooks season 1, but none of the other seasons. We have a single Doctor Who story and though you can rent the new Doctor Who, as part of the Entertainment package you only have the single Jon Pertwee Spearhead from Space.

True I could have watched other stuff, but I didn’t want to watch Desperate Housewives or badly made TV movies. I wanted more of the stuff I had watched.

So though it was only costing £5 per month, I’d rather not pay £5 per month for re-watching the same content again and again…

If they bring in new content, I may subscribe, but for now I’m going…

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Serving media through the home

I really like my EyeHome device. I’ve had it a few years now and even had it fixed in Germany one time when the power supply failed. Changing to 802.11n made it much better and more capable of showing content from my Mac on my television.

It’s such a great concept I did wonder if I would be able to serve media to other devices and not just the EyeHome.

This came up recently when I put a Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) under my television which can act as a uPnP device and serve content from an appropriate media server. Not only that, but you can pair a PlayStation Portable (PSP) with the PS3 to be able to access the PS3 remotely.

A plan was starting to form…

If I could get the PS3 to access content from the Mac, I could then watch it remotely on the PSP. The PSP didn’t like accessing content direct from the Mac, so this could work, couldn’t it?

The first issue was getting some media server software running on the Mac, the EyeHome software didn’t work; and though Elgato make a uPnP software product, EyeConnect, it appeared from the Elgato website that the PS3 as a media extender was not in the list of supported extenders, and there were a few reports in the Elgato forums which kind of put me off. There is a 30 day trial, so I might give it a go later.

What did come out in my research was Twonkymedia.

The PacketVideo MediaServer enables you to share your multimedia throughout your home. It is available for many different platforms and interworks with a large variety of client devices including XBox 360™, Sony PS3™ and Sony PSP™. TwonkyMedia requires fewer resources and is faster than other UPnP media servers, and provides more features that help users enjoy large media collections.

Installed and ran it…

Worked very well.

The PS3 picked up the iMac which I was running the software on.

The PSP picked up the PS3 – though I believe that the PSP can access the media direct, but I was trying to be clever!

I tried a few other devices.

The iPod touch through the web interface could access the media.

My Nokia N95 could access the server, and the media.

A Nokia N810 could access the media, it just couldn’t play it!

Overall I was impressed, very likely to pay the €30 it costs.

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When the GO!ng gets tough…

Okay despite my earlier problems and upgrade issues I am quite pleased with the GO!VIEW service.

I have downloaded a few bits and pieces.

Hustle

The quality of the Doctor Who video was quite poor, almost VHS quality, however I was more impressed with the quality of the Hustle video which was (in my opinion) as good as the quality I have managed converting EyeTV Freeview recordings.

Now I suppose there are some downsides.

According to the GO!VIEW interface, I only have access to the recordings for 29 days, however this could be just because of the “free” month, but I somehow don’t think so.

Also once transferred to the PSP, I only have 14 days in which to view the video.

The major big downside is the choice, the library of content on GO!VIEW is very limited. If it wasn’t for Hustle and Spooks I probably wouldn’t subscribe and if I watch the lot by the end of the month and there is no new content then I will certainly be cancelling my subscription.

Lets wait and see.

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Still someway to GO!

Has some computer downtime, so I took the opportunity to download some television programmes from GO!VIEW to watch on my PSP.

Downloaded an episode of Doctor Who, formatted a new Memory Stick (as the one I had on the PSP was full) and clicked transfer…

Oh!

I now need to update the firmware on the PSP (and I thought I had the latest on there, well obviously I don’t).

So now downloading a 25MB firmware 4.05 update…

Ho hum!

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GO!VIEW

I have been playing about with video on my iPod and have downloaded video from the iTunes Store including television shows and movies. It has been relatively simple and painfree (for me). So I was intrigued when I got an e-mail from Sony (or was it Sky) about the new GO!VIEW service for the PSP.

PSP

I was interested less so in the free month’s trial, but more in the fact that season one of both Hustle and Spooks were available, as was some classic Doctor Who. They aren’t available (yet) on the iTunes store.

Now yes I could go out and buy the DVD box sets, but GO!VIEW looked really interesting as (yes a free month) and the Entertainment package was only £5 ($10) per month.

Now that struck me as much better value than the £1.89 ($4) per episode I have to pay at iTunes… and I know I get to “keep” the episodes at iTunes, but sometimes you don’t want to pay a huge amount to see an old series.

So was the process going to be as easy as iTunes was?

Well no it wasn’t.

Firstly you have to be running Windows, so there was no way I was going to do this on my Mac except through Parallels.

To be honest I should have kind of expected that especially as they were probably going to use some form of Windows Media DRM.

So went through Parallels and ensured that I could connect to my PSP through the USB port as the process did require you to do this.

GO!View

So according to the website GO!VIEW is “so simple to use”, well let’s put that to the test!

I then tried to sign up and found I was required to download a GO!VIEW application, well I can’t complain about that if I download iTunes can I?

Once I downloaded I tried to get the free trial, but it would seem you have to subscribe first and then that gets you the free trial. You do need to give a credit or debit card however this is quite normal with any subscription service that I have seen.

Everytime though I filled in the registration data, it found an error and then “wiped” out a fair few of the fields, so after three attempts at pressing the submit button I was getting annoyed.

Eventually I was registered, so you can guess that I got even more annoyed when I clicked the download button for the episode I wanted to watch and I got an error message. Nothing about it in the FAQ or even in a Google search.

Hmm. One of the FAQs did mention Firewall issues, so I checked my Firewall settings in Windows and actually made it more restrictive, but this seemed to do the trick!

So now I could download.

Yay!

Well it’s slow so I haven’t yet managed to download an episode without impacting on my internet connection as GO!VIEW uses a peer-to-peer download manager based on the same Kontiki software that powers Channel 4’s 4oD and the BBC’s  iPlayer download service.

Unlike those two services though, GO!VIEW programmes can only actually be watched once transferred to a PSP.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

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Big Screen with a PSP

One of the new features of the 2000 series of the PSP is that you can now purchase an AV cable which allows you to watch video or view photographs through your TV (or through a projector if it has composite video inputs).

I recently got hold of a cable, it is available through Amazon, but initially I tried at my local Sony centre (well the PSP is a Sony product and it’s an AV cable and the store has lots of big tellies) well no luck there. Nor at Dixons (well dot Curry Digital’ish aren’t they called) in the end I tried Game and found one on the bottom shelf nearly hidden away.

At £12.99 it’s not expensive, but it’s not cheap either, but it does work very well. You can get cheaper ones at Amazon.

Initially I tried the cable with one of those small portable Toshiba LED projectors and though I couldn’t get any audio it worked much better than I thought it was going to.

The I tried a normal projector and that worked fine.

I used it to view video and image as well as play audio.

One concern I did have was that there was a warning on the packaging that the PSP could only output in NTSC format only and of course here in the UK we use PAL, so when I got home I connected it to my TV, which is an older Sony CRT model and it worked really really well.

I couldn’t get it to display any games though.

PSP

Overall I was impressed with the cable and the quality of the output.

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Full Resolution Video on your PSP

If you have a PSP with firmware 3.30 or later you can now (much more easily) play full screen h.264 video.

Prior to firmware 3.30 adding video to a PSP was a bit hit and miss.

When I first got a PSP I was very disappointed with the quality of the video I encoded for it using either EyeTV or Toast, more so when I compared it to the demo video I had on the demo UMD disk which came with it.

It wasn’t for some time that I didn’t realise that the PSP did not support full resolution video from a Memory Stick.

You also had to convert the video to a specific MP4 format and importantly change the name to something unfamiliar like M4V01011 and then find the obscure \MP_ROOT\100MNV01\ folder. You were restricted to a 368 x 208 resolution. If you wanted a thumbnail you had to create a jpg file and then rename it as .thm all quite complicated though there were quite a few tools that allowed you to do this quickly and easily (I used Toast quite a bit). One problem was working out what video files were what (easy on the PSP, more complex on a computer).

With the release of firmware 3.30 this changed.

Encoding full resolution h.264 video for the PSP is now possible, this means that you can use the full 480 x 272 resolution and the excellent quality and compression of h.264.

However when I started to encode video for a PSP with firmware 3.30 I did initially have a few problems.

I tried to encode some full resolution video using VisualHub and the in-built settings and then some settings from a forum. However in both instances the video would not play on the PSP.

I initially thought it was maybe because at the time I was using the trial version of VisualHub (which has a two minute limit). However using the default low res settings it encoded and played fine.

I even formatted the Memory Stick wondering if that would solve it, it didn’t.

So I encoded the video in the original pre 3.30 firmware specificiations. As I copied over the video to the \MP_ROOT\100MNV01\ folder when I noticed a Video folder in the root of the Memory Stick.

So I copied the full resolution video over to this video folder, and guess what, yes full resolution h.264 video on my PSP.

PSP

Really impressed with the quality.

Really impressed with VisualHub.

So if you have firmware 3.30 or later ensure that you use the PSP to format the memory stick and then you will have a video folder into which you can copy the video files without having to worry about any naming conventions and be able to have full resolution high quality video.

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GPS for the PSP

Interested to read that you can use GPS with your PSP.

So as well as browsing the net, watching video, looking at photographs and listening to audio, you can now use your PSP to find out where you are and where you need to go.

You know one day they’re going to makes games for this excellent device.