How to Convert Video for Viewing on Your PSP Handheld

Your PSP or Playstation Portable console is a miraculous little device. When Sony put the PSP together they thought they might as well make it a multimedia beast, something capable of pretty much anything and therefore a perfect companion for technology hungry gamers out there. The PSP plays movies, music, views photos, loads secondary software, and then of course plays video games. Nowadays it even plays emulated Playstation games via the Playstation 3. What Sony didn't do however was make all of its many options easy to use.

The process of putting video onto your PSP is something of a conundrum that Sony doesn't openly assist its customers with. First off, they use their own file format, something common to specific hardware, but not feasible for those looking to utilize the PSP's ability to load video from your computer onto a memory card.

So this is your dilemma - you have a PSP, a sleek black multimedia machine. You also have video files on your computer, in .Avi, .Wmv, or .Mpg format that you want to play on your PSP. Your friend tells you to plug the PSP into your computer with the USB cable he gave you and transfer the files. But they don't work do they?

That's because the PSP uses the MP4 format, a newer coding version of the mpeg videos you already have on your computer that compresses the files even smaller and uses less juice to play them, thus the use of the format on both your PSP and your video iPod. The format is solid, but it's almost never how you'll have video files on your computer. So, the first they you have to do is convert your old files into the PSP's MP4 format.