Duo Sticks..some dont support Sony's music format!?

[HeadRusch]

When I pick up my PSP this week one of the things I also want to order online is a larger capacity Memory Stick Pro Duo. But I'm not sure what kind to get, or what size.

Obviously I'd like to get a 1GB card so I could rip a DVD to it in the event I needed to travel and HAD to have a movie...and didn't have my laptop with me. But besides that I'm not sure I'd need all that space.

Whats this about non-sony memory cards not supporting the sony digital music format?

Correct me if I'm wrong here but the PSP comes with software that lets you convert WAV's or MP3's to Sonys own music format, which takes up less space with pretty much equivelent sound quality right?

Also, kind of off topic, but I digress: Hows the quality and file size of ripping a movie to a MemoryStick card? Can you fit a DVD on a 512meg stick with the equivelent quality of a purchased UMD movie?? Or do you need the 1gb card to get that done?

If I recall, using DIVX I could rip really nice quality movies to 1 CD....so 640megs, which looked great on all the 27" analog tv's in my house......since the PSP's format is of lower resolution, does this mean you can use a VBR process to make the files small enough to fit on a 512meg card and still maintain excellent video quality? Thanks!

[PsyClerk]

The PSP does not come with the software to convert stuff. I know mine did not.

A friend of mine converted a DVD to play off his 512MB memory stick and it looked fine (file size was about 480MB, can't remember how long the movie was...it was Ocean's 12). Then again, neither one of us is really critical of FPS and the like. What might be acceptable to me could be unacceptable to you.

[Quackzilla]

Sony software engineers are working on making Atrac3 work on PRO Duo sticks (until then, probably during the summer, you can use mp3 files), and the video files must be mpeg-4.

With mpeg-4 you can bring a full length movie to under 250MB and still have it look about VHS quality.

[bone_matrix]

Don't know about the music, but I ripped Dumb and Dumber (106 minutes) using PSPvideo 9, and it came to about 220MB. I still had more than enough room on my 256 card for saved games. A 2 hour flick might fight, but it may be close.

(It was on the lowest settings, and it still looked decent.)

[ransom456]

As Psyclerk said, you can get a decent quality movie on a 512 MB memory stick. IMHO, to get a full length film under 256 it is suffering quite a bit in quality. And no matter what size of MS you have, you aren't going to be able to get a UMD quality movie. The resolution for movies off the MS is capped.

[HeadRusch]

Crap, really? The UMD movies run at the higher resolution than what you can put on a MS? Bleh..that sucks. Well, its not the end of my world or anything, but its disappointing to hear.