One of the great things about the Sony PSP is the fact that you can convert your own DVD’s into a format that will play on the handheld device.

There are a number of ways of going about converting your DVD’s to play on the PSP, but with the recent release of Dark_AleX’s custom firmware 3.03OE-C, there is only really one (convenient) way to convert DVD’s to playback at the unlocked 480×272 resolution (a resolution previously only available via UMD movies), and thats using xvid4psp (DCEmu release news).

This tutorial will show you how to rip your DVD to play on the PSP using xvid4psp. The settings used will convert a DVD for playback at the full 480 resolution. If you are not using the 3.03OE custom firmware, you can still follow this tutorial, but you will need to select a resolution that your PSP is capable of playing back.

Download (see DCEmu link above) and install xvid4psp on your computer. The latest release (4.049 at time of writing) is a fairly hefty 17.5mb, but does include pretty much everything you will need to convert a DVD, assuming your DVD is protected (more on that shortly).

This is xvid4psp up and running on my PC :

For this tutorial, I selected The Fast and the Furious DVD, for no other reason that there are a couple of scenes that I’ve always had trouble converting smoothly in the film, and I was keen to see if the latest xvid4psp version could handle them.

I hit a snag here with xvid4psp – when selecting the DVD option, the progam failed, unable to open the vob file on the DVD. I decided to switch to DVD-FAB to rip the DVD to my harddisk, to see if this resolved the issue. DVD-FAB can decrypt DVD’s, so any copy protection on the disc could be circumvented if required.

Once the film was ripped to disk (I extracted the main film only with DVD-FAB), I went back to xvid4psp and did a ‘file > open’ and pointed it to the ripped DVD on my harddisk, finding the first VOB file of the film (VIDEO_TO\VTS_01_1.VOB).

Once selected, xvid4psp imported the file and checked for problems.

Once xvid4psp had completed its scan of the files, it presents you with a new dialog box, allowing you to select how you want the film encoding. I selected the 480 profile in the bottom right selection box (labelled format).

You can see the exact selection below :

Once selected, press OK and you will return to the first screen.

You can see here the film in the pending to process list. Now press start and the film will begin the conversion process into a PSP friendly format.

You will get a prompt showing the status of the Virtual Dub (sound processing takes place first).

Depending on the options you have selected, you may get two passes of the film encoding. You need to be patient at this stage, it takes a while to encode the film to a high quality (especially on my aged, underpowered PC).

When xvid4psp has completed the encoding, you will see the following message appear in the log window:

All thats left to do now is copy the film to your PSP and enjoy. In the case of 3.03OE custom firmware users, I had to copy the file to a folder called 100ANV01 (within the MP_ROOT folder), and keep the filename the same as xvid4psp had called it (MAQ00001.MP4).

Once copied to the PSP, select the film from the video menu option. If you are using 3.03OE firmware, you should see full screen 480×272 playback resolution (assuming your media source wasn’t a strange format, or one that required extensive cropping, resulting in widescreen black bands).

The quality of the video playback after encoding is very good – in fact its the best I’ve come across so far in terms of final quality. There are still a few minor artefacts to be seen in certain scenes, but these are much less than any encoding I’ve done before. The slight frame skip I’ve experienced with other encoders also seems to have been eradicated. Colour is not quite as vibrant as the original source, but this doesn’t detract overly from the final result, and is still very watchable. Sound is fine through a set of decent headphones.

If you have had trouble getting xvid4psp to work, I recommend you download the latest version and give it a try, as its the first version I’ve managed to get running on my PC.

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