Big Movies on the "Really" Little Screen.

Little G picked out a new toy a few months back after graduation. The item was a very cool PSP, otherwise known as a Playstation Portable. I had never seen one of these in person and wasn't sure what to expect from a $250.00 mutated gameboy. I have to admit that I was surprised and now wish I had one of these little babies for myself. You can of coarse play games, which there are quite a few to choose from and listen to music ala MP3 or WM. What I didn't know at first is that you can even surf the internet with it. Just find a wireless signal and it will jump right on and a surfing you can go. Another nice this is that you can watch movies on the system using the UMD disc format, and the full color widescreen screen looks great. Now most of the movie companies where releasing movies on UMD at the same time as DVD, but now it has been announced that the UMD format is going to be dropped. This kind of made me upset, thinking that we just buy one, and now it won't support movies anymore.

A solution to this problem was pointed out to me via a company called SlySoft (SlySoft.com). This company offers a program called Clone DVD Mobile. Now before I dive into this please be aware that you should never violate copyright law and illegally copy or sell copyrighted material. But, fairuse law states you can make a copy of a movie that you own for your own personal use to preserve the original copy. Now back to the program. This little thing lets you take any DVD from your collection and shrink it down to a file-size and type that will fit on a memory-pro duo card and play flawlessly in your PSP. I don't know all the technical aspects of the how the program works, but the file you create is perfect and looks great on the PSP, with no artifact or jumping. On a 1GB you can fit about 3 full length movies. This method falls into the gray area, but is a good solution to help bypass the UMD system that is being discontinued.

This program can also convert movies to play on IPod Video, Creative Labs ZEN and other portable devices. It also support and converts to DivX, Xvid, AVI, MP4 and more.

They also have a program call AnyDVD that, among other wonderful features it allows you to watch various region coded dvds on your computer. So if you have a R2 (UK) DVD you can now watch it on your computer without having to worry about resetting your region code. This is very helpful when you have a lot of overseas DVDs in your collection like I have.