PSP specs tempting

[lexor]

well from IGN News (http://gameboy.ign.com/articles/430/430939p1.html?fromint=1) it's clear that PSP (a handheld game console in making by Sony) will support MPEG4 AVC aka H.264 decoding, and considering it would have 16:9 ratio on the screen and 1.8GB of storage per Disk. This looks alot better than buying a DVD player with some DivX hack and slash capabilities.

I mean H.264 video, upto 7.1 audio (plus AAC, mp3 & ATRAC3), 1.8GB per disk, 16:9 sceen all in a palm of your hand... and it plays games! Would be awesome for on the go or workplace entertainment. What you guys think?

btw, what exactly does @Level 1,2,3 "mean" for us?

AVC Decoder
AVC(H.264) Decoder
Main Profile
Baseline Profile
@Level1,Level2,Level3
2Hours(High Quality) - DVD movie
4Hours(Standard Quality) - CS Digital

[Neo Neko]

It sounds great untill you ask this question. Where are you going to get the MPEG4 AVC codec. If you manage to find one will it be compatable. And if it is compatable what container does it need to be in and how are you going to get it there. Sure this sounds great, And once things get ironed out I am sure it will be. But till then it is not going to be as usefull as those Divx DVD players.

[communist]

For home I still trust my geexbox-powered DVD / DivX / * player :)

[Neo Neko]

Geexbox and movix are great. But it is kinda hard to lig them around wherever you go. For that the PSP sounds interesting. But there are still quite a few logistical issues to get ironed out.

But for the home you honestly can't beat a media PC running geexbox etc. It beats the pants off any set top divx player. And it always will. I honestly think that multicapable PCs are the way convergience will/should go. At this point most of us have an old PC lying around. And it is dirt cheap to turn them into such devices. I have 1 1/2 of them :D.

[lexor]

but with DVD copy being a big no-no (listen to MPAA) I doubt Sony will relese movies for PSP on it's memory cards. So an encoder would have to exist and specs are specs, it's like MPEG4 support now, few support XViD features (extended) but the basic stuff does work in hardware DVD players.

[MfA]

There will likely never be UMD burners either.

[21_already]

I was actually gonna start this thread myself till i found it was already here.

As far as i can tell UMD is opto-magnetic and given it's branding i'm sure SONY wants to push it as the successor to MD (despite them also making a direct MD successor which i reckon uses the same tech.) and whether or not the PSP itself writes the discs, they're sure to make some sort of writer available.
I think there will be a bigger effort at some opint to integrate the UMD format into more devices, hence the name: UNIVERSAL MEDIA DISC, altough it is likely heavily protected.

Seriously, from what i've heard the chip design on the PSP is somewhat revolutionary (everything integrated into one die type stuff). I don't think anything can touch this in terms of portable video decoding for at least a couple of years: it's got everything you don't get on the jukeboxes too: replacable cheap mass media, AVC decoding, AAC decoding.

Just think about the cheapest portable DVD player with a screen you can find. This is likely smaller, cheaper, more advanced, plays games, songs, does WIFI, has a longer battery life etc.

I beg someone, anyone, what should be done about DRM on the PSP.
Someone, anyone, must figure out the PSP container format if it's non-compliant. For SONY to be using AVC at all when they want MPEG-2 derivatives for their Blu-ray systems implies they might in fact be going compliant with the PSP.
This device is going to be important, i swear.

[MfA]

No it is purely optical. They indeed want to see adoption of UMD, as a secure medium for content providers. Hence almost certainly not recordable.

[Atamido]

I feel confident in Sony's ability to kill any decent format. For a preview at what will happen here, just look at minidiscs.

They were a very rugged magneto-optical disk. They were a small form factor so you could put them in your pocket, and since they were enclosed so well, they rarely got damaged. (I had a roommate with a hundred of the disks, and he never had an issue) The audio was recorded on the disk in the ATRAC compression format, with your option of several degrees of quality. If just recording mono voice, you could get a couple of hours on a single disk. Many of the portable players even had digital audio outs so that you could play it back directly on high end systems. More recent players have USB connections that let you copy music over.

The problem: Sony DRM'd the heck out of them. All of the players were designed so that it was impossible to read back the data on the disk to an external source. If you recorded something to the disk, instead of letting you copy the ATRAC file off of the player, you had to re-record off the the audio outs from the player to get the audio. Even connected by USB, you can copy the music to the player, but not back from it.

This would have been an amazing format if you had been able to copy files to and from the mini-disc. If someone has a mini-disc player, they could use it for data transfer instead of USB drives. The drives are small, and the media is much cheaper than many other forms. I am sure that it would have been much more popular, but Sony killed the format with their oppressive DRM scheme.

[Mug Funky]

@ Pamel:

very interesting. i hadn't thought of that, though i knew it intuitively - i never got an MD player for precisely the reasons listed, but i never thought that would kill the format. i always figured if the format were adopted widely the file transfer options would become better too. guess i hadn't figured on Sony's stupidity on that front.

apparently MD recorders work brilliantly as external A/D or D/A converters (they wont transcode to ATRAC if you go on the fly), which seems an obtuse reason to buy one of the things.

i haven't much faith in Sony really - their equipment really stinks lately. un-usable interfaces, sub-par specs and their AUD$500 headphones sound so bad i wouldn't wish them on a deaf person.

one thing they have going though - their DiscMen are nigh-on indestructible. i treat mine so so bad, and it still works beautifully (on my non-sony headphones :))

[communist]

Originally posted by Pamel
This would have been an amazing format if you had been able to copy files to and from the mini-disc. If someone has a mini-disc player, they could use it for data transfer instead of USB drives. The drives are small, and the media is much cheaper than many other forms. I am sure that it would have been much more popular, but Sony killed the format with their oppressive DRM scheme.
A shame - especially since Sony were fighting for more consumer rights (or at least for the right to sell a device) back in the VCR days :|

[avih]

MD is a good format imho. i've got one of those (from sony) from about '98. it's very usable and very durable (my brother still uses it for live recordings of his group).

my specific piece doesn't have fancy quality/compression control (only stereo/mono), no usb, etc. but it works very well for recording (i've got 2 stereo mics, one from sony, one from aiwa), and to make collections of cd tracks for playback on the move.

true, it does have drm, but imho, it's kinda best of both worlds. you can record the analog output (which is good enough for normal usage), but u can't copy it bit-by-bit. i think most drm schemes are worse for the consumer, and imo, sony has found the golden path with their approach.

[midi]

I don't know about the US market, but I know in Japan Sony already has an MPEG4 video recorder out. It has a tuner/video in and saves onto memory sticks (speaking of crappy, proprietary Sony formats) which you can playback in their PDA or laptops.

It's not the advanced MPEG4 format mentioned in the parent, but it shows how Sony has handled this situation in the past. Maybe the PSP will even have a memory stick slot in addition to UMD capability.

[bond]

Originally posted by lexor
[B]well from IGN News (http://gameboy.ign.com/articles/430/430939p1.html?fromint=1) it's clear that PSP (a handheld game console in making by Sony) will support MPEG4 AVC aka H.264 decodinggreat news for a great format ;)

upto 7.1 audio (plus AAC, mp3 & ATRAC3)hm as atrac3 doesnt support multichannel afaik (hm maybe sony has some hidden specs for this somewhere) and mp3 also doesnt do it (apart from the new not mpeg extension, which actually isnt real multichannel tough), only aac is left for the 7.1 part :eek:
i assume thats only marketing cause where should people get 7.1 sources from?

btw, what exactly does @Level 1,2,3 "mean" for us?mpeg-4 defines always profiles and levels, which are interoperability points
like divx5, xvid follow mpeg-4 asp@l5, which means they should interoperate without any problem ("should" because the crappy avi container prevents interoperabiltiy most of the time)

Originally posted by Neo Neko
Where are you going to get the MPEG4 AVC codec. If you manage to find one will it be compatable.well if sony claims to be able to play avc baseline profile @ level 3, any encoder which outputs content following these PL should be usable...

And if it is compatable what container does it need to be inthats the important question indeed
i am pretty sure sony will not look at vss' avc-in-avi and alexnoe's aac-in-avi hacks, so avi is out (hopefully! :D )

the official container formats for avc are .mp4 and .mpg (i am not sure if aac is specified for .mpg, so maybe the .mp4 container is the only alternative???)
also if they support aac files, there will not be a way around supporting mp4 too, as maybe 90% or more of the aac files out there are mp4. so why not simply place avc in there too, as the mpeg-4 standard specifies it...

and how are you going to get it therethats the other important question
i assume it needs some smart developers which reverse engineer all the ugly hacks guys like alex introduce to keep outdated formats like avi alive ;)


about MD/atrac: rjamorim will include atrac3 in his next listening test, than we will see how good md really is qualitywise

[Soulhunter]

Originally posted by Pamel
I feel confident in Sony's ability to kill any decent format. For a preview at what will happen here, just look at minidiscs.

They were a very rugged magneto-optical disk. They were a small form factor so you could put them in your pocket, and since they were enclosed so well, they rarely got damaged. (I had a roommate with a hundred of the disks, and he never had an issue) The audio was recorded on the disk in the ATRAC compression format, with your option of several degrees of quality. If just recording mono voice, you could get a couple of hours on a single disk. Many of the portable players even had digital audio outs so that you could play it back directly on high end systems. More recent players have USB connections that let you copy music over.

The problem: Sony DRM'd the heck out of them. All of the players were designed so that it was impossible to read back the data on the disk to an external source. If you recorded something to the disk, instead of letting you copy the ATRAC file off of the player, you had to re-record off the the audio outs from the player to get the audio. Even connected by USB, you can copy the music to the player, but not back from it.

This would have been an amazing format if you had been able to copy files to and from the mini-disc. If someone has a mini-disc player, they could use it for data transfer instead of USB drives. The drives are small, and the media is much cheaper than many other forms. I am sure that it would have been much more popular, but Sony killed the format with their oppressive DRM scheme.
:goodpost: Same opinion here !!!


@bond

Hehe, do you remember our discussion @ DD's... :D


Bye

[bond]

Originally posted by Soulhunter
Hehe, do you remember our discussion @ DD's...shh dont talk about our secret plans ;)

[Soulhunter]

Originally posted by bond
shh dont talk about our secret plans ;)
... ;)


Bye