A guide to PSP pitfalls

[inerd]

This post is probably not going to be in any sence definitive but I thought that it might be useful if I share my experiences of PSP encoding with the rest of you. I know that lots of people seems to be encountering problems so here are my personal experiences, mainly with the H.264 codec as that results in smallest filesizes and best picture quality. Some of this may be repetition but I thought I should put it all in.

Video:

First of all, resolutions for video.

For standard 4:3 ratio video (e.g. most television is this size) a resolution of 320x240 should be used. This is also the same as the standard PSP encoding preset and when set by the PSP to full screen will have black bars on the sides.

For 16:9 widescreen video (most films, some TV) a resolution of 368x208 should be used, this when set to full screen will fill completely. It can also be used for the standard PSP preset.

For very widescreen video, 2.35:1 it gets a little more complex. Unless you want to have your video stretched when playing full screen, you will have to add balck bars along the top of your video to make it a 16:9 video, causing a scarifice to filesize for blackness.
If however, you don't mind the stretch you can set your video to 416x176 which is the most appropriate filesize.

If like me you don't want the stretch you will have to encode twice, once using a setting such as .MOV mp4 and adding in padding in the Filters > Letterbox tab to revert your video back to a standard resolution. Needless to say this takes around twice the time.


Bitrates come next and this partly depends on your memory stick size, your demands for quality and guesswork. The standard 270kbps is pretty decent and will give you a nice picture and a small filesize. For faster moving action I would tend to go higher than this but as a general rule stay within about 300-400 as any more really is not usually noticeable.



Audio:

64kbps audio is usually fine and depending on your tastes could go up to about 128kbps. I tend to go for 96kbps as a median value of that. Sampling I know nothing about so feedback on that would be appreciated. Nor do I yet know if the PSP will support variable bitrates.

Other:

Very important this, make sure that under options you have decode with Quicktime checked, as the encodes I have done without have had audio problems though you might be smarter than me and not have had any.

While you're in options, add a name for your film.


Problems:

One problem that I have often had is audio becoming unsynced. Decode with quicktime will often fix this but not always. A solution that seems to be working so far (crosses fingers) is to again do a re-encode from my standard PAL to NTSC or NTSC film framerates. This seems to stop problems with synchronisation but adds several hours for me.

Last and something I have not been able to solve yet is audio volume, many files on the PSP are almost inaudible. So far I have not seen any method of raising audio levels yet an I have been forced to edit my originals in quicktime by bossting them as far as I can. If anyone can point me a tab in ffmpeg to fix this or even better a way to alter them after making a playable PSP file I would be very greatful.


I hope this is helpful to other PSP users. (Also I'm on 2.60 firmware and am not upgrading anytime soon from the sound of it)

[kingofthemoon]

but with 2.7 its doesnt work
So for me this doesnt help
can u change back 2 2.7?

[Alric]

"Last and something I have not been able to solve yet is audio volume"

Due to this issue and the broken H.264 in PSP FW 2.7 I have resorted to using PSP Video 9 in windows. Works fine with the ugliest interface I have ever seen...

Cheers!

[tbrend]

Last and something I have not been able to solve yet is audio volume, many files on the PSP are almost inaudible. So far I have not seen any method of raising audio levels yet an I have been forced to edit my originals in quicktime by bossting them as far as I can. If anyone can point me a tab in ffmpeg to fix this or even better a way to alter them after making a playable PSP file I would be very greatful.

Download MPEG Streamclip. There is an option to increase the db's from the original to your new output file. I used it and it works great.