Playing with stuff

2 minutes reading time

PSP Video

Been playing with various things the last few days, mainly trying to get video’s onto my PSP. It’s been more of a pain than it ought to be. There’s not so many programs for the mac to make it as simple as it ought to be. The few that I found were more expensive than free and not as good as mac apps should be. Finally found one that seems to get it in the right format without much hassle but it looks like it’s early in it’s development because you can only do one file at a time, so a queuing feature would be nice. Otherwise it does a good job as well as being free. You can find it here ffmpegX a DVD, SVCD, VCD, CVD, VOB, DivX, XviD, H.264, PSP, iPod, MP4, MOV encoder for Mac OSX

It’s a real pain that you can’t just drop the files that most podcasts and the other video formats come in straight onto the PSP. The conversions take around 10 mins or more for 20 min videos so you can’t just drop them on at a whim if you suddenly need to go out and you want to take the videos with you.

I found that the best settings for the podcasts I get from iTunes are to use the PSP H.264 preset setting and then go and alter the video resolution to 320x240 unless it’s already a widescreen video. It’s also worth making sure it’s set to NTSC. Apparently PAL works on PSPs with later firmware but when I re-encoded a video the audio was out with the video.

del.icio.us

In the course of getting this blog set up I’ve been reading a few blogs and come across various nifty apps (web and mac), some of which I’d seen before but not really considered as being of that great a benefit. Being in a webby mood I thought I’d give them a try. I’m pleasantly surprised with del.icio.us thus far, although I can’t actually access the site right now - I hope this is a one off and it’s not down too much otherwise it’s going to rapidly get binned. What’s the point of having all your bookmarks available on any computer if you can’t access them if the site’s down or too busy? And now it’s back up! :)

Maybe tomorrow I’ll add some more first thoughts on del.icio.us along with some of the other apps and utils I’ve found.

And please someone tell me why I’m listening to 80s on iTunes??


Got any questions or comments? Drop me a message on Twitter (@elaptics).