Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

PSP Firmware Update 2.8 Available 110

Posted by timothy from the omg-you-mean-you-don't-have-it-yet dept.
tekisui writes "PSP firmware update 2.8 is out, adding several minor features and one major one, the ability to play music and video out of user-named folders on memory sticks. Finally, I can label my movies and music with useful names, instead of Sony's cryptic naming conventions.."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

PSP Firmware Update 2.8 Available More

PSP Firmware Update 2.8 Available

Comments Filter:

  • If you like homebrew...don't update... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by metasecure ( 946666 ) * on Thursday July 27, 2006 @11:09AM (#15791149)
    Sony has again provided nominal updates in their new firmware, in an attempt to entice users to upgrade and lock down the homebrew community.

    So now we wait for Dark_aleX to crack this firmware, and for Booster to update Devhook and make the PSP developers "even madder" as users continue to load all versions of the firmware on their 1.50 PSP's.

    • Thank you (Score:3, Interesting)

      by CyberLord Seven ( 525173 )
      I have the misfortune of being an owner of a Sony PSP. I have decided against updating the firmware on my PSP to retain control of it. You can imagine how pissed off I was when I discovered that a new game (finally something I wanted to play after TWO years of waiting) I bought would NOT play on my original PSP.

      What really pisses me off about Sony is that I bought MY PSP primarily as a game machine. I have every Game Boy from the original through the Game Boy Advance and they ALL have backwards compatib

      • The games that require new firmware generally include it on the game disc. That means you can play them on your PSP if you follow the instructions.

        I know you don't want to. But there's no need for the reality distortion.

        You're not a victim. You can get down off the cross any time you want.

        • Re:Thank you (Score:3, Interesting)

          by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) *
          You're not a victim.

          The Hell he isn't! Sony is trying to break his property by disabling functionality in what they claim is an "update," and is also lying by saying the new games are compatible with his device when they clearly aren't. Therefore, he absolutely is a victim of either fraud or vandalism, depending on whether his firmware got updated or not.

          • Re:Thank you (Score:1, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward

            Sony is trying to break his property by disabling functionality in what they claim is an "update," and is also lying by saying the new games are compatible with his device when they clearly aren't.

            There are a few key misconceptions that you are relying on in your argument, and so I will try to enlighten you.

            Sony has said from the onset of the PSP that they would look to enhance the firmware to provide added functionality. Lets face it; in this day and age, there is no need for set firmware. And if

            • Sony has never said that they would support or even allow homebrewed applications. It isn't as if these applications are made by legitimate developers with legitimate development kits.

              Let me enlighten you of your misconceptions:

              First, Sony is in no position to "allow" or disallow anything. Once the customer has bought his PSP, that's it -- Sony no longer has any right to control what the user does with it. Period.

              Second, the idea of "legitimate" developers and "legitimate" dev kits is a load of crap. For

            • It isn't as if these applications are made by legitimate developers with legitimate development kits.

              Where do I apply to have my startup company become a legitimate developer with a legitimate development kit?

          • The Hell he isn't! Sony is trying to break his property by disabling functionality in what they claim is an "update," and is also lying by saying the new games are compatible with his device when they clearly aren't. Therefore, he absolutely is a victim of either fraud or vandalism, depending on whether his firmware got updated or not.

            Put down the gun and read for a second. NOTHING is 'incompatible', that is false. NOTHING is 'broken' by a firmware update, false. He simply does not want to run a firmware

            • NOTHING is 'incompatible', that is false.

              Does, or does not, his unmodified PSP run the new game? Since it does not, because it doesn't have the "updated" firmware, it is incompatible! The fact that it can be made compatible does not change the fact that in its current state it is incapable of running the game.

              NOTHING is 'broken' by a firmware update, false.

              Before the update, it could perform $SOME_DESIRABLE_ACTION. After the update, it could not. Therefore, it is broken because the desired functionality

              • Does, or does not, his unmodified PSP run the new game? Since it does not, because it doesn't have the "updated" firmware, it is incompatible! The fact that it can be made compatible does not change the fact that in its current state it is incapable of running the game.

                It does not.

                Does, or does not, your Windows machine run Prey without the drivers required by the game? If you had to install ANYTHING, by your argument, both the PC and game are 'broken'. Absurd.

                Before the update, it could perform $SOM

                • Does, or does not, your Windows machine run Prey without the drivers required by the game?

                  Removing the DirectX update will prevent you from playing that game that requires it. Same with the PSP. They are no different. Either you are not understanding, or you are being deliberately obtuse.

                  Drivers and DirectX can be removed after I'm done playing Prey. The PSP firmware cannot. That's the difference!

                  Please specify what $DESIRABLE_ACTION you are thinking of, that was "broken"?

                  It doesn't matter what the actio

                  • Drivers and DirectX can be removed after I'm done playing Prey. The PSP firmware cannot. That's the difference!

                    In fact you can downgrade it. Sony doesn't support it, but it is possible. There are a handful of 'downgrader' apps out there that let you flip back and forth.

                    Are you sure you can downgrade DirectX? Ever tried it?

                    It doesn't matter what the action is, which is why I wrote it as a variable. Any function that is desirable becomes "broken" if it ceases to work. It's a tautology. This is in contras

                • Does, or does not, your Windows machine run Prey without the drivers required by the game?

                  No, but the drivers required by Prey do not break, say, Lockjaw [tetrisconcept.com].

                  Sony has never said you could run homebrew software, ever.

                  So what's the procedure for becoming a licensed developer of software for PSP?

        • I have recently bought two games for my PSP: Ghost In The Shell and an anthology of old games. Neither will run on my PSP with the factory installed firmware. All I see when I try to run either of these disks is a error message stating that the games are not compatible with my firmware. There are no instructions for loading an update from the disks.

          You may be right. Such instructions may be there, but I don't see them on my PSP. Maybe my firmware is too old. I bought my PSP the first day they went o

          • Do you work for Sony or own a lot of Sony stock?

            Nope. I just don't sympathize at all. If you want to play the games, you can do it by upgrading the firmware. If you don't want to upgrade the firmware, you can't play the games. You have ample choices.

            And they're games. You're the victim of a worldwide conspiracy to force you to go through an extra step to play some games. It's the worst atrocity in handheld gaming history! Worse even than the recent Lemming genocide and the Liberty City murders of las
            • so yeah... umm with a firmware of 2.5 you can downgrade to 1.5 and be able to play games coded for 2.0-2.7 so far. it is not hard to do at all. i have my psp set up like that. i have 1.5 firmware on mine still but i use a tool to trick the system to let me play my newer games. yes it sucks havning to do that, but it would suck even more not to have it at all. Plus if you feeling up to it you can always get the new Mod Chip that is out and you can use Custom firmwares made by the homebrew people. I have
            • It is a gaming/multimedia device and users of it shouldn't update because it breaks some geek thing?

              Gaming.slashdot.org must have "it is funny,laugh" icon on every story :)
        • While you are right in the sense that the game includes the firmware needed to play the game (and the grandparent is not a victim per se), I have to wonder how valid the need to use a given revision of firmware is.

          Traditionally, consoles have had fixed firmware and all games had to work with all revisions of the hardware. I don't see the reason why Game X won't run on my 1.50 (well, when it WAS 1.50) PSP other than possibly Sony MAKING the developer upgrade the firmware as a condition of being licensed. I

      • Contradiction (Score:3, Insightful)

        by SuperKendall ( 25149 )
        Which is it? Either you want the PSP for homebrew or (as you said) you want it for games.

        The issue is a simple one - using it for homebrew means it's not really going to be useful for games. Using it for games means using it for homebrew is going to be very hard.

        I am thinking to buy one as well - but only for homebrew. I ahve no illusions ar expectations that Sony will support me in this regard, so I feel no animosity towards Sony for failing to suypport the device in a way for which they did not mean it
        • I bought it for games but for the first two years there was nothing beyond Ridge Racer that inspired me to want to pay for them. In the interim I have bought a Neuros II and now use it to watch MPGs of television shows during my morning commute to work.

          Since then I have bought two games; Ghost In The Shell, and a collection of ancient Midway games. Neither works with my PSP.

          I hope you have an open mind and can see how someone who has bought a machine with one purpose in mind can change the primary purpo

        • Agreed. I do not understand all the unwarranted animosity that is thrown towards Sony with regards to the firmware issue. (There ARE plenty of other reasons however) From a business standpoint, it makes sense for them to prevent unlicensed/unsigned programs to run on their hardware. This would take away from royalties and QA guidelines and checklists that have to be gone through before a game is allowed to be released. Also from a piracy standpoint it makes sense for Sony to want them locked down. Let'

          • I downgraded from 2.0 to 1.5 and use mine as a SNES/NES/Genesis handheld emulator.

            If you dumped your own Game Paks, which copier did you use? I wanna buy one! True, Tototek has copiers for Super NES and Genesis, but I'm more interested in the original NES.

            *If you downloaded the ROM images, you are violating copyright, and you are likely pirating games published by companies that are still developing official PSP games, potentially denying them a sale. If you downloaded the ROM images of Game Paks that

        • I am thinking to buy [a PSP] as well - but only for homebrew.

          If you don't want commercial games, and you want the most homebrew-friendly handheld platform with a D-pad, get a GP2X from GamePark Holdings.

          • That is tempting but the lack of integrated wireless kills it for me. I basically want to make a universal remote for a media computer out of whatever I use. The DS is really tempting as well, depending on how easy it is to write an app from scratch for...

            My ideal object would be something like the GP2X but with Bluetooth 2.0 support for lower power consumption.
    • I believe Sony ought to consider an update which allows access to program memory for homebrew, but not kernel memory so that commercial games can't be launched. I believe the number of people attempting to crack the update would be significantly less since the homebrew dev's have no motivation to crack it (it would only be people interested in pirating who care). Personally, I refrain from updating solely because of the homebrew apps/games scene, but if such an update was available I'd go for it even if t

      • I believe Sony ought to consider an update which allows access to program memory for homebrew, but not kernel memory so that commercial games can't be launched.

        Sony tried a homebrew sandbox with PS2 Linux, but it bombed commercially. Besides, if Sony opened up PSP user mode to the public, the following would happen:

        1. People would emulate the PS1 inside the PSP using pirated PS1 game ISO images. This has happened with NES games on GBA and Super NES games on Nintendo DS.
        2. Companies would sell PSP games desi
    • With Sony continuing to try to block homebrew on PSP, why do people keep assuming that the PS3 is going to include a full version of Linux?
      • Because Sony doesn't mind homebrew running in a controlled sandbox, that's what the Net Yaroze, and Playstation 2 Linux kit were for.

        And putting Linux on the PS3 is another bullet point to add to it's capabilities. Sony can market that thing as a "secondary" computer. "You want to read your e-mail while someone else is using your windows machine? With Linux on your PS3 you can."

  • I have been known to load songs onto a Memory card and use them on multiple devices. I am very glad that Sony has upgraded its multimedia abilities so that PSP users no longer have to use arcane naming and specific folders. I do not like any device that forces such burdans on the end user. I have far too many songs to have to put them in a specific way.
  • I was excited that I could stream video via rss, however, when you go to the "sample channel" the video makes you save it to memory stick and then go to your video folder to watch it....

    oh well. perhaps when ps3 arrives video streaming will be an option like location free tv.

  • Whats with the updates? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by juletre ( 739996 ) on Thursday July 27, 2006 @11:22AM (#15791274)
    Why does it need to be updated all of the time? As far as i know this doesn't happen with the DS.

    (this was not a pro-DS post, i am just curious)

    • The DS firmware can't be updated at all.

      Sony mainly updates the firmware so often in order to close security holes which allow owners of the PSP to run homebrew applications on their PSPs. If you want to run newer PSP games, you need to have updated Firmware versions.

      • The DS firmware has multiple versions, however updating is transparent to the user, and occurs when they fire up a game with the firmware update on it.

        The "clearest" update is the one that adds the ability for the DS to talk to Nintendo's WiFi Connection service via ordinary routers. This update also breaks a loophole in the GBA emulation code that allows DS code to be executed from a GBA cart. The first Action Replay relied on this, so the upgrade broke it. I bought one and discovered it didn't work.

        • Re:DS firmware has multiple versions (Score:5, Informative)

          by Abcd1234 ( 188840 ) on Thursday July 27, 2006 @12:23PM (#15791850) Homepage
          The DS firmware has multiple versions, however updating is transparent to the user, and occurs when they fire up a game with the firmware update on it.

          Uhh... sorry, but this is *totally* wrong. The DS firmware is different on later hardware revisions, however it is impossible to transparently update the firmware on an existing DS, because the region of the EEPROM containing the firmware checksum can't be written to without shorting the SL1 pad on the board.
      • "The DS firmware can't be updated at all." Not actually true, although it is designed to be not doable by the user (you have to short a [marked] pin). Theres been a little under a dozen different ds firmware versions iirc
    • I am not an expert, but here is my best guess. There really is no OS for Nintendo DS. All that Nintendo DS has is a "launcher" that gives you options on how to start the game. The meat and potatoes of the DS is actually in the games. If Nintendo wants to do something like add handwriting recognition to the DS, all they need to do is update future games that will need that feature. They add it to their API and then it is only added if it is needed. The software that is included with the DS is pretty

      • Re:Whats with the updates? (Score:5, Informative)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot.worf@net> on Thursday July 27, 2006 @11:45AM (#15791497)
        If you ripped games for the sole purpose of making them onto ISOs so you can play them off memory stick, the PSP firmware is similar. Sure it's got a more advanced kernel that can do more stuff (multithreading!), but most games come with their own versions of the system libraries (and the 2.x ones are updated to look for 2.x kernels even if they don't use any features of it).

        UMDs suck, so I rip my PSP games to ISOs and play off of memory stick - you won't believe how fast games can run that way (or how godawful slow UMD is). Of course, for new games, that involves decrypting the game files, replacing the system libraries with 1.x ones, and a few other tricks. A library of 1.x games will provide the necessary 1.x system libraries, and there are decryption programs to decrypt executables using keys stored in firmware.

        The firmware provides some system libraries as well, but I believe those are only for the built-in apps, rather than games. (Makes sense, since no one wants to have to deal with library hell when they buy a console game!)

    • Evil pirates (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Thursday July 27, 2006 @11:47AM (#15791525) Journal
      People keep cracking the PSP to run their own games/programs, the so called homebrew scene. Wether sony is upset with them is up for debate. An offspin of this however is that cracked PSP's can also play ripped commercial games and Sony most definitly is against this.

      The DS has also been cracked and it too can be used to play ripped commercial games.

      The difference is that running cracked games is a software problem on the PSP were on the DS you need some special hardware that you can't buy just anywhere. Al you need to play a ripped PSP game is a big memory card, like say the ones sold by sony itself or even included with the PSP in the gigapack.

      It seems pretty clear that Sony is slowly releasing updates each update giving you a goodie but it will also fix the security hole that allows you to play non-sony approved content on the PSP.

      In itself it is nothing new, some games with frequent updates could possible be doing the same trick. You want our bug fix? Better have the original exe handy. How many crackers are willing to crack a game again and again? With the PSP it is even better. Each time you crack it you run a risk of bricking it.

      So why doesn't Nintendo upgrade its hardware since they been cracked as well? Well they did. I think with the DS Lite they included a new firmware and if you got one of those the old passkeys (the bit of hardware that allows you to play unofficial games) don't work anymore. No problem you pirate. New ones are available.

      Still they cost money, it is a physical product and that means somebody wants money for making it, perhaps this reduces the piracy. Most people do not have a huge library of games. If you only want handfull of games you are not going to spend 150 euro in a dodgy online store to run games that run almost perfectly when you can get the games you want for the same amount guarenteed to work from a regular store.

      Second is market differences, perhaps the people who want to play nintendogz or brain age are less likely to pirate then say GTA Liberty City players?

      What is odd is that because DS games are typically much smaller that piracy actually is easier. If you want you could easily store hundreds of GBA and DS games on a single memory card. Most PSP games are to big to fit in the 1gb memory sticks.

      The DS is capable of downloading content from the net so it should be able to update. Maybe it does. Doubt it, someone would have found out by now but just because they haven't doesn't mean they can't.

      The naive idea is that Nintendo doesn't do this to be nice to its customers. Yeah right, this could only be considered an option by the insane or those to young to remember the Nintendo before Sony kicked them in the nuts with the PS.

      More likely is that Nintendo doesn't consider it a big enough threath.

      This is probably combined with not having the possibility to offer goodies to get people to upgrade. Sony is running a risk that people who would buy legal games, like me, might not buy a game if it requires me to upgrade and not use my homebrew anymore. It also runs the risk that it might break one of its own games.

      In short it is all about piracy and how companies attempt to deal with this. Sony is more aggressive in its attempts but Nintendo too changes its firmware when it sees an opportunity.

      • My speculation: The DS doesn't have the hugely sophisticated firmware that the PSP has, instead it is mostly in the game cartridge itself.

        Thus there is no real need for updating the firmware, as the game includes the libraries that work with it.

      • Re:Evil pirates (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Abcd1234 ( 188840 )
        The DS is capable of downloading content from the net so it should be able to update. Maybe it does. Doubt it, someone would have found out by now but just because they haven't doesn't mean they can't.

        The naive idea is that Nintendo doesn't do this to be nice to its customers. Yeah right, this could only be considered an option by the insane or those to young to remember the Nintendo before Sony kicked them in the nuts with the PS.

        More likely is that Nintendo doesn't consider it a big enough threath.

        Actual
      • It's funny when your entire rant on why Sony upgrades the firmware (because they're being mean) vs. Nintendo not upgrading it (because they're being nice) is completely invalidated by the fact that the only reason Nintendo doesn't upgrade the firmware is because it's pretty much impossible to do so. I assure you, if it were made that way, Nintendo would update the DS so that the passkey's did not work.
        • Nintendo did. They apparently didn't think it was important enough. The poster above you also mentions this and yes it is probably true, but by Nintendo's own design. And they knew about the passkey system since the GBA so why not design the DS differently?

      • Re:Evil pirates (Score:3, Informative)

        by Mattintosh ( 758112 )
        Actually, I am old enough to "remember the Nintendo before Sony kicked them in the nuts with the PS", and I'm going to disagree with you. The reason lies in the times before the PSX existed.

        Remember back in the 16-bit days, when there were a whopping 4 revisions of the SNES, mainly to update board designs for newer parts from different suppliers? And Sega had the Genesis with several dozen revisions, some of which completely broke compatibility with early games? Yeah, this all sounds familiar. And Sega was
      • The other thing is Sony does add new features to it. For instance it supports two different video codecs, and they added wma and flash support via firmware update.

        Also the original psp didn't have a web browser feature - that was added as a firmware update.
    • Because the PSP is much more(TM) than a game console. It is the ultimate 23rd century multimedia device brought to you in the 21st century by Sony. Well for sony marketing point of view.

      If you have an older version of the PSP firmware, you will quickly see that the PSP is seriously lacking except in games. So, Sony provided a functional game console running on a wonderful hardware but almost nothing sweet that uses this hardware except for games. So now from time to time there is a new firmware with new fea

  • Full Res Video? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Neon Spiral Injector ( 21234 ) on Thursday July 27, 2006 @11:31AM (#15791351)
    I don't keep up with PSP news all that much. Has Sony allowed video stored on a memory stick to be played back at full screen resolution yet? With the death of UMD videos, you'd figure they'd be nice and unlock the full-res playback of user-encoded video. But then again this is Sony...
    • They will give with one hand, take with the other
    • With the death of UMD videos, you'd figure they'd be nice and unlock the full-res playback of user-encoded video.

      I don't think that anyone is expecting a company that thinks there were Giant Crabs in Ancient Japan's history to do anything logically.

      It's Ridge Racer! RIIIII-DGE RACER! [youtube.com]

    • Re:Full Res Video? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They did so in an earlier update (2.5 I believe). It wasn't listed in the changelog though.
    • I got a PSP a month ago. Clueless as I was I installed 2.71. It works very nice, with web browser, flash etc etc. I put movies from video.google.com as well as Mpeg4/H.264 that I make myself on my memory card: yes, it plays in fullscreen. Naming has always been a mess with video (less so with audio) so 2.80 seems like a good upgrade for a Sony Luser.
      • The videos have always played full screen. But Sony doesn't allow 1:1 pixel mapping from the video to the display. They always scale the video from half-res to fill the screen. Video played back from UMDs was at the actual resolution of the screen and much sharper looking.

        • But Sony doesn't allow 1:1 pixel mapping from the video to the display. They always scale the video from half-res to fill the screen. Video played back from UMDs was at the actual resolution of the screen and much sharper looking.

          (talking out of my behind) Either the UMD Videos use a Sony proprietary codec that's faster for the 222 MHz MIPS CPU to decode than MPEG-4, or perhaps the MPEG-4 patent pool offers a royalty discount for devices with an effective resolution smaller than a given threshold.

          • Or else Sony wanted people to buy a copy of the DVD and the UMD, and not just transcode the DVD to MPEG-4 and watch from a memory stick at full quality.
            • I'm sure this was Sony's original intention. After all, why would anyone pay the same price for a UMD as for a DVD which they could easily rip and watch with the same quality on the PSP. Even though the quality is better, I still haven't bought a single UMD. Sony's pricing policy was way off with that one. UMD's should have cost $10 each. If they were cheap enough then some people would have bought them instead of going through the hassle of trying to convert the DVD's. Either way, the original poster wa
              • After all, why would anyone pay the same price for a UMD as for a DVD which they could easily rip

                Ripping a DVD costs thousands of dollars, including the price to move your family to Canada, one of the only remaining developed countries which doesn't yet have a DMCA.

  • Am I the only one who isn't annoyed? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by thatguywhoiam ( 524290 ) on Thursday July 27, 2006 @12:58PM (#15792143)
    I received a PSP as a gift a few months ago. When I received it, I was well aware of Sony's DRM issues. However I took a radical position - I decided that the unit, as-is, was something I still wanted.

    Crazy idea huh? It had 3 games I really liked (Lumines, Wipeout, GTA). It plays all my audio files from iTunes, AAC and MP3. I could rip DVDs and videos to it fairly effortlessly with software like Handbrake or PSPWare.

    So what's the big deal?

    Well, the big deal as we all know, is that the potential for the device is much more than what Sony can throw at it. And I think this rankles a lot of users. Not the majority, mind you, not even close... but enough to create a homebrew scene.

    However I look at that scene with a sort of detatched interest. I've never been tempted by any of the homebrew software enough to downgrade the firmware. I'm simply... happy with it. Crazy I know.

    Since I received it, the thing has gained major abilities at a regular pace. Web browsing, RSS feeds, Flash lite, WMA support, better wireless security, etc. None of this stuff was really promised or advertised, but we get it all for free. Now I do cool stuff like stream from my G5 to the PSP (MyTunesRSS [macupdate.com] - kicks ass).

    I dunno. Call me quaint. I am happy with the thing because I was satisfied with its capabilities as it was presented. So I can't really feel jilted. (Of course, it was free for me. But if I dropped mine in the lake tomorrow, I'd probably go get another.)

    • If battery life were longer maybe it would be more useful as a homebrew device but I'm just tethered to an AC outlet with this, and plus you don't want to drop the PSP or else you'll have dead pixels or even break the thing, unlike with the DS. The load times are long and games show slowdown, there aren't many games that really take advantage of the system and make good use of it. For everything Sony wants me to use it for, I don't think it's a very good machine, so I'd like to tinker around with it and s
      • I think for a majority of users, they do not run their battery down every time they use their PSP. If you do in fact need more battery and will not be near an outlet for an extended period of time, you can purchase additional batteries, or batteries that last longer.

        A longer battery life would be nice but I don't see it so bad as it being a detriment.

      • If battery life were longer maybe it would be more useful as a homebrew device but I'm just tethered to an AC outlet with this, and plus you don't want to drop the PSP or else you'll have dead pixels or even break the thing, unlike with the DS. The load times are long and games show slowdown, there aren't many games that really take advantage of the system and make good use of it. For everything Sony wants me to use it for, I don't think it's a very good machine, so I'd like to tinker around with it and see

  • Give me a break. A major feature would be the rumored playstation emulator, or signifiganty improved power management... The web browser was a major feature. This update didn't add any capabilities to the device, it only made an existing capability slightly easier to use. That is practically the definition of a minor update.
  • You could be using homebrew to play your music and videos and neatly avoid the broken naming scheme that sony uses.

    Don't upgrade if you don't have to!

  • As is often the case, the description Sony issues with the firmware updates doesn't usually tell the full story.

    Yup, they added MUSIC, PHOTO, and VIDEO folders to the root directory, which is good. The VIDEO folder can contain subfolders, also good. You can dump that stupid naming format, goodgood.

    Here's what's not so obvious... videos placed in this folder not only no longer make use of Sony's proprietary metadata atoms, they no longer require it. This means that you can use non-DRM iPod videos or many

    • But, for some bizarre reason, AVC/h.264 videos won't work under the new VIDEO folder.


      They work for me. I've just downloaded http://geekbriefwp.podshow.com/ [podshow.com] (which is iPod AVC/H.x264) via RSS and they played flawlessly.

      No more converting iPod formatted vodcasts

      • I noticed the same thing shortly after grabbing an AVC video via an RSS feed. Also that the Spiderman trailer from Sony's Connect site was AVC and worked. Most of my videos were created with PSPVideo 9, which uses the MobileHackerz modified ffmpeg. So it may be an bug with that encoder. :(
        • Ahhh, interesting, I just tried a self created AVC file (created with ffmpeg based PSPVC) and it doesn't work in the new video folder, but put it in the MP_ROOT/101ANV01 folder with the usual MAQfoo and it works. Regular MP4 SP created with PSPVC works fine in the new folder.

          So I guess we have to keep the old folder around for our self converted AVC files, at least for now.

Slashdot Top Deals

UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker

Close