At home due to my son-in-law living with us, we have a very extensive DVD collection. But I never really had the time to sit and watch one more than once a week if that (and that when TV wasn’t being used by anyone else). I love films though and realised that if I could get a PSP, put films on it then I could watch films during my commuting. I’ve been playing catchup!

It works very well. I bought the PSP Gigapack- One GB SD card, usb cable, plus headphones and a game that cost £219- probably cheaper now, plus the £15 case with screen protector from game.co.uk and a set of Creative Noise Reducing headphones from Dabs.

After much searching on the web, I found DVD Decrypter. which takes a DVD and produces a set of vob files. And PSPVideo9 here. Both are free.

So that’s it. To convert a DVD and put it on a PSP, insert the DVD run DVD Decrypter. I’ve found the best way to do this is the re-author option. There is usually a title part which is about 4GB in size. Just copy that and let DVD Decrypter run. It takes sbout 15-20 minutes to rip the DVD and create the VOBs. The longer bit is PSP Video 9 which processes the VOBs and produces the .MP4 files (and then copies them over if you plug in your PSP).

Expect to take roughly an hour from start to finish though it depends on film size. Some DVDs have extra protection and you can use the free utility DVD43 for those. Many of the DVDs given away with the newspapers have no protection on anyway.

As for UMD- Sony’s equivalent of DVD- A bit of a failure I think. Why pay more than a DVD for a poorer quality version? Depending on the film length and quality settings for PSP Video 9, you can get 1 or 2 films on a

The headphones are fantastic- especially as they cost just £25. You can pay up to £300 for really high quality ones like those that Bose sell. Without these the train background rumble frequently masks dialogue. With these its crytstal clear.