Knowing the Formats Supported by Your PSP


To use your PSP to its fullest, you have to get technical. Playing Universal Media Disc (UMD) games and viewing UMD movies is simple: You toss in the UMD and go to town. Dealing with non-UMD filesthings you transfer from your computerrequires that they be in the proper formats. Furthermore, you need to put those files in folders that the PSP will take note of; if they're not where the PSP expects them to be, the device won't be able to find them.

That's because the PSP doesn't have an intelligent file browser. It relies on your computer skills (your ability to create directories, transfer files into them, and such) to plop the files where it wants them.

For audio files, for example, you have to create the proper directory on your PSP's Memory Stick Duo, and you can even create one level of sub-directories. But if you put audio files anywhere elsein different directories, in a second level of subdirectories, and so onthe PSP will assume that the files don't exist and will not acknowledge their presence, no matter how convincingly you try to tell it that the files are there.

Bits, Bytes, and Megabytes

I talk about data quite a bit in this book, so allow me to sum up what some of this terminology means.

Bits are single pieces of data. Bytes are 8 bits. Most data storage is measured in bytes or some multiple of bytes, such as kilobytes, megabytes, or gigabytes.

Depending on whom you ask, one of two measurements indicates how many bytes are in a kilo-, mega-, or gigabyte. A kilobyte (KB) is 1,000 bytes, sometimes measured as 1,024 bytes. A megabyte (MB) is 1,000 or 1,024 KB (in other words, 1 million bytes or more); a gigabyte (GB) is 1,000 MB (in other words, 1 billion bytes or more). In the olden days, a few kilobytes was considered to be a vast amount of data; nowadays, an average music file containing a single song measures in at around 4 MB.


So what the heck are formats? Good question! By format, I actually mean file format.

And what the heck is a file format?

Oh, you want to know that, too? Good thing you asked!

Let's start with the basics. A file, in Computer Land, is a hunk of data that the computer recognizes as a single entity that can be saved on some kind of media, such as a hard drive, a floppy disk, a CD-ROM, or a flash device like a Memory Stick Duo. The file itself can contain any number of lines of code, which is stuff written in some mysterious language that the computer can read and understand. Files can be tiny, taking up a few bytes or kilobytes of space; they can be massive, taking up many megabytes or even gigabytes of space; or they can be anywhere in between.

Because computers do lots of different things, and because most of those things involve creating or manipulating files, thousands of types of files exist. For many types of computers and their operating systems, files are stored as a filename followed by a period and then a three-letter file extension. The file extension indicates to the computer the type of file that it's dealing with. When you see a file called blah.exe, the filename is blah, and it's an .exe file, which happens to mean that it's an executable program. Your computer can run that file.

Media files come in many formats. Music files might be in the ubiquitous MP3 format (a song might be saved as a file called blah.mp3 ) or in another music file format, such as WMA, ACC, or WAV.

The format indicates how the file is created and read by a computer or a computerlike device, such as a PSP or an MP3 player. Most file formats use some type of compression to make the files smaller, ideally without degrading the quality of the media.

Thus, you can consider a file formatas applied to media files like audio, movie, and picture filesto mean both the way a file was created and the way it's meant to be read by a computing device.

Your PSP is capable of playing or displaying files only of certain formats. To its credit, the PSP supports a whole bunch of formats for photos and audio, and throughout the life of the product, more file types have been added as parts of firmware upgrades.

Compression: Results May Vary

Compression is a computer-driven method to make a big file smaller. MP3 files, for example, are compressed music files. In theory, it's possible to compress a media file without causing it to lose any of its fidelity or clarity, but in practice, the results varymainly by how sensitive the listener's ears or eyes are. Some forms of compression are considered to be lossy, meaning that they degrade the media. (Lossless compression, on the other hand, is compression that leaves the media in its original condition.) Compressed photographs may have noticeable artifacts in the picture; compressed audio may sound tinny or muffled.

To complicate things further, compression quality can vary per file. Audio files like MP3s are affected by the bit rate that is used in the creation of the file. Bit rate indicates how many bits of audio data are squeezed into each second of the sound or song. High bit rates result in less compression loss, but they also create larger files. Low bit rates result in smaller, more manageable files, but those files may be lossy.


Video Formats

The PSP supports all of one video format: MPEG-4, in which files have the extension .mp4. You can get videos for your PSP from all sorts of Web sites (such as FilePlanet, at www.fileplanet.com) or use a utility such as Xilisoft PSP Video Converter (available at www.xilisoft.com/psp-video-converter.html) to convert just about any video file format to PSP-ready MPEG-4.

For more information on converting video formats to PSP-acceptable formats, see Appendix B.


MPEG-4 is a low-loss compression format defined by the Moving Picture Experts Group and made popular by Apple, whose QuickTime video player for PC and Mac plays the format natively. Apple's MPEG-4 Web page (www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/mpeg4) tells you all about this standard.

Apple's native H.264 format, in which iTunes movies are delivered, is ratified as part of the MPEG-4 standard.


Audio Formats

Chances are that your digital music files are readily available in a PSP-friendly formatunless you get your music from Apple's iTunes Music Store. Sadly, although the iTunes format is compressed with the ACC (Advanced Audio Coding) algorithm, which is supported by the PSP, the protected files are in MPEG-4 format, which is not supported by the PSP.

The PSP does support the following audio file formats:

  • MP3. This is the format that popularized digital music. MP3 has been around for years. The MP3 format is the audio portion of the MPEG-1 media format, called MPEG audio layer-3. Because it's an older compression format for audio files, critics of the MP3 format point out that it can be quite lossy, especially at lower bit rates. It is still the most prevalent music format, however, and your PSP is ready for it.

  • MP4. This format uses a codec that's part of the MPEG-4 media format. ACC is a very high-quality standard, with far higher fidelity than MP3. The downside is that MP4 files are rare, and although the iTunes Music Store uses the ACC audio compression, it wraps them in a format that's incompatible with the PSP.

    Rumors have prevailed that Sony and Apple were going to jump into bed and make the PSP compatible with iTunes, but except for a few homebrew apps that allow limited streaming of iTunes music through a PSP using an RSS feed, it hasn't happened.

Did any of that last bit make sense? I cover the PSP's RSS (Really Simple Syndication, a form of Web-based ... well, syndication) capabilities in Chapter 11. Streaming, meanwhile, is sort of a digital version of radio. In streaming, instead of playing directly from a storage device like a Memory Stick Duo, media plays from a networked source. To stream a file, your PSP must be connected to a network, and that's not always convenient when you're out and about.


  • WAV. This is a noncompressed format known as a wave file. WAV files tend to be massive but of near-perfect quality. The files must be in a format called Linear PCM, which is the most common type of WAV file.

  • WMA. That extension stands for Windows Media Audio, and a good deal of legally purchased digital music comes in WMA format. Less lossy than MP3 but not quite as sexy as ACC, WMA has one major downside: Those legally purchased digital music downloads usually are copyright protected, and the PSP doesn't support those particular types of WMA files.

For information on converting audio formats and CD music to PSP-acceptable formats, see Appendix B.


Other audio formats supported by the PSP are called ATRAC3/ATRAC3plus, which are used by UMD Audio and UMD Music discs. Judging from what I can glean from the Web and my contacts at Sony, there may be such things as both UMD Audio and UMD Music discs, the second of which apparently contain actual music albums. Some have even been releasedin Japan. No such things exist in the United States that I know of, so the whole point of this note is not to worry about those formats. As long as you can rip your CDs to the other formats the PSP supports, or if you get your music digitally in one of those formats, you're all set.


Image Formats

Like other media files, image files are subject to those wacky things called formats. If you're familiar with image-editing programs like Corel's Paint Shop Pro and Adobe Photoshop, you know that there are dozens of image formats. Here are the ones that the PSP supports:

  • JPG (JPEG). This standard (pronounced "jay-peg") was developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group. This compression format greatly reduces the size of image files but can also cause fairly obvious defects (called artifacts ) depending on the level of compression. Most photo-editing software allows you to adjust the level of compression. More compression results in smaller files with more apparent artifacts; less compression results in larger but better-quality files.

  • GIF. This image format (pronounced "jiff") stands for Graphics Interchange Format. Considered to be a lossless compression format, it crunches images but is limited to 256 colors. This means that higher-color images (such as 24-bit or 32-bit images) are not GIF-compliant. GIF is considered to be Web-friendly because GIF files tend to be small and, therefore, load quickly over the Internet, but they're not the best for displaying photographs. Development of superior GIF formats ran into trouble due to certain patents preventing the files from being free of licensing complications.

    The number of colors in an image file is called the color palette. The colors usually are expressed in bits per pixelin other words, how much color information is stored for each dot that makes up an image. A 256-color image, for example, is an 8-bit picture; a 16-bit picture has 65,536 colors, and on upward. Although 32-bit pictures are widely considered to be "true color," 48-bit images are claimed to be superior to the trained eye.


  • TIF (TIFF). TIF (Tagged Image File Format) files are the opposite of GIFs: extremely high quality but very large files. Although TIF files can be compressed through many standards, they can use lossless compression, resulting in huge files in terms of compression containing very high-quality images.

  • PNG. Portable Network Graphics format was developed as a license-free replacement to overcome the limitations of the GIF format. Lossless, using a compression engine developed by PKWare (used in PKZip, of the popular .zip file-compression format), PNG files tend to be large and very pretty.

  • BMP. BMP, short for bitmap, was the Windows standard back in the DOS/Windows 3.0 and 3.1 days. BMP files are almost always uncompressed. BMP files have gradually declined in popularity as JPG and TIF files have gained. BMP files normally have a 24-bit palette limitation, although Windows XP introduced a 32-bit BMP format.




Secrets of the PlayStation Portable
Secrets of the PlayStation Portable
ISBN: 0321464362
EAN: 2147483647
Year: N/A
Pages: 95
Authors: Joel Durham

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