Get more from Sony's PSP

Tip 1: Video Conversion

Multimedia on the go will be a major attraction for buyers of the PlayStation Portable. Sony's beautiful screen shows off movies in the console's proprietary UMD format perfectly, but playing your own video, music and photos from a Memory Stick isn't quite as simple. You will need to gather the following, none of which are supplied with the console itself:

• A USB cable (available from Joytech)

• A computer with a selection of multimedia or access to the Internet

• Video conversion software (such as PSPVideo9)

A larger Memory Stick Duo would also be advantageous, especially if you plan on watching full-length movies. You can use the standard 32MB one for testing, but it will only hold a few minutes of video. As we said in our review, Memory Stick Duo media isn't cheap, with a 512MB card costing around £60 and a 1GB card £100.

We assume you've got your PSP, you've clocked every last track in Wipeout Pure and you've racked up an unbeatable high score in Lumines. Now you want to enjoy some video entertainment on the move. First of all, some caveats: you'll need to have an existing collection of video sitting on your computer's hard drive if you want to get the most out of your PSP. You can convert DVD movies if you look for decryption software online, but as the legality of such action is a very grey area (even if you've paid for the DVDs), we can't point you in the exact direction. Luckily, sites such as divx.com have plenty of content for you to play around with.

Download a conversion tool
The PSP can play video in the MPEG4 or AVC format. Unfortunately, most video files shared on the Net uses the DivX or Xvid format, so you'll need some sort of conversion software before you can even think about watching it back on your PSP. Luckily, a free PC program launched almost simultaneously with the PSP called PSPVideo9, and thanks to numerous updates it is the easiest way of converting your existing video files to a format the console can handle.

Choose your video
We downloaded a Fantastic Four trailer to our PC from DivX that weighed in at exactly 16MB. In PSPVideo9, go to the Setup menu and use Profile Picker to select the sort of video you want to convert. The advanced user can change the exact bit rates for video and audio, but we chose to stick with the presets. There are various options for films and music videos, but nothing for movie trailers, although bearing in mind a trailer's similarity in length with a music video, we chose this option and pressed Save.

Now, if you go back to the Convert menu, you can choose the video you want to convert. We picked our movie trailer and the program immediately went about converting it. It does two passes, compressing the video each time, and a minute later you're left with one 5MB file. To copy this to your PSP automatically, simply click the Copy button. The software will automatically send movies to the correct folder on the PSP (which, for reference, is rather unhelpfully named MP_ROOT\100MNV01 on your PSP). The program will also show the contents of both your hard drive and your Memory Stick.

Build up your Library
In terms of picture quality, the converted video was good, if not great. The picture is washed out and the colours look very flat -- a world away from the beauty of UMD movies. Of course, you'll have to buy a bigger Memory Stick if you want to convert more than a short music video. As a rough guide, it takes about half the length of the video to actually encode, so you're looking at a 1-hour conversion for your average movie. Our advice, if you're serious about your portable movies, is to invest in something like the Archos AV4100.

Go to TIP 2 : Photos and Music