when Ritsuko times out

I just spent the better half of a day catering to the PSP’s whims when it comes to video. Better write this down before I forget it!

Video: Even shit at 320×240 looks great on the screen, but 363×272 is the way to go if you don’t want anything to look blurry in any way (although most resizers will probably complain about how the dimensions aren’t a multiple of 4). Bitrate of 500-600 may be too much for the PSP (maybe that’s why it said this file couldn’t be played). Once I put it down to 200-300 kbps the PSP plays it like a good boy – only if there’s an audio track present, which is weird. Speaking of audio tracks, I simply transcode from my Vorbis tracks. There doesn’t seem to be any restrictions on audio. It’s just too bad the PSP doesn’t play Vorbis. MKV, OGM etc will work, if you get eLoader (only needed if you use a PSP Slim like I do) and PSPlayerMT, but my experience is that PSPlayerMT has some serious bottleneck which makes it stutter all the time, regardless of how big my video is. It’s better to just use the official video player, even if it can be an ass and not play your soft subtitles that you so painstakingly extracted from the OGM file, and also ignore those chapters you muxed into the mp4 file.
Also, if you’re experiencing weird blocky glitches in the video which don’t appear when you play the video on your PC, try unchecking all the advanced B-frame options in MeGUI – specifically, Adaptive B-Frames, B-Pyramid, Weighted B-Prediction and Bidirectional M.E. I’m not sure which one of these is the culprit, but since each episode takes around 20 minutes to encode, I’m not really pumped on finding out. Also, if the PSP recognizes the file as video, but says ‘cannot be played’, put Trellis down to level 1, and make sure Mixed Reference Frames is off (you can’t have MRF with Reference Frames <2, but make sure if you’re using RF 2 or above).
To get the most speed out of your encodes (it is a small screen after all, who cares about quality unless you’re using ATi’s AVIVO converter, in which case it’s fast enough that you would just set everything on max anyway. But since I’m using a 1.8GHz single core Athlon XP…) lower values of subpixel refinement give a great boost on performance. From level 4 (Always QPel) to level 3 (HPel on MB then QPel) gets me from 21fps to 39fps. Definitely useful if you’re trying to find out why your PSP won’t play your files. In conclusion, the PSP player is so finicky, and MeGUI needs me to manually mux everything into a final mp4 file, that playing videos on the PSP is simply a novelty (one that can be achieved smoothly with only 75MHz!) and it probably will be until each episode takes me 1 minute to encode (RadeonHD 4870 and C2Q Q9550, I’m looking at you).
If you don’t want any low bitrate artifacts, 400kbps ABR looked as good as it gets for my RahXePhon episodes. Of course, that was only 1 pass. 2 pass might be smaller.

Games: Surprisingly enough, the CDs I ripped didn’t work (PSX emulation) when I put them into the PSP, but the image file I downloaded from the internet worked well enough. Guess I gotta download everything from the internet, because I don’t think I burnt my PSX CDs that accurately. No Lunar Eternal Blue Complete for a while, I suppose.

Audio: I really hate how Vorbis doesn’t work, because I have a lot of Vorbis tracks. Simply firing up NervOS and waiting for it to finally load isn’t my idea of a media player. Other than that, it really is a nice music player, as long as you have enough space.

I’m glad I bought the PSP. Couldn’t say the same for the GBC.