I thought I’d toss an underhand lob for anyone wanting to make fun of me… okay, with that out of the way, here’s my little mini-ItsNotAReview of downloading movies from the Playstation Video Store to your PSP.  I’m not a huge fan of watching movies on portable media devices, but admittedly, the PSP is one of the better devices I’ve used.  On SG’s recent trip to cover CES in Las Vegas, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to try out something I’d already felt guilty about knowing very little about… and what do you know, I learned a few things (which I’ll share with you right now) along the way!The first thing I learned about the PS Store is that there are a lot of titles that are purchase only, not rentals.  I only wanted to rent a movie this time so I filtered by “Rental”.  The second thing I learned is that sorting by “Rental” isn’t 100% accurate.  I wanted to rent Strange Wilderness, which was clearly listed in the Rentals section, but when I finally got to the entry in the store, it was only for sale… Bummer.

I finally settled on Get Smart (hey, I’m easily entertained… and thankful for it!  Why would I want to NOT enjoy more movies?!?!)  So I purchased the movie from the store and chose to download it.  Oddly, after returning some time later, I couldn’t find the movie.  It wasn’t easily located in the Video section of the XMB, I couldn’t find it in the Downloaded list within the Store… finally, after tweaking my sorting options I found it on the XMB.

Looking at the information offered about it, I could see that the download was good for 14 days and as soon as I started watching it, it was playable for 24 hours.  Pressing triangle on the video offered a rather odd “Move” option.  Expecting to see “Copy to PSP” or “Move to PSP” I kept looking for the obvious way to get the movie from my PS3 to my PSP.  I should mention that the native Playstation Store interface on the PSP doesn’t offer access to the Video Store.   I was quite surprised by that.

After a quick (and fruitless) search for instructions on how to get the movie to my PSP, I selected the “Move” option.  Bingo, I was instructed to connect my PSP via USB.  Holy crap!  The movie was over 1.7GB in size!!!  Yeah, I guess it probably told me that sooner, but wowsers… that’s virtually a whole UMD in a single file!  Now I’ve converted movies to play on my PSP before and I’d never cranked one out even half that size…  I have a 4GB memory stick in my PSP and I didn’t even have enough room to fit two movies on it.  That wasn’t too friendly for my trip…  one movie is about two hours, I sure hope Get Smart is good enough for the way there and back… oh, yeah… that 24 hour viewing window…  I guess I’ll have free space to get another movie when I get there… oh, yeah… I need my PS3 to download a movie.  Hmpf.  Yeah, I can see a problem here.

Once I was safely on the plane and the captain told us we could use personal electronics, I pulled out my PSP to watch Get Smart.  The first thing I noticed was how incredibly sharp the video was.  Okay, I now see what the large filesizes get you… top quality audio and video.  There was no blur to the video like some of the other videos I’ve watched, it was as sharp as anything I’d seen on my PSP and the sound was of equal quality.  I watched a little over an hour of the movie before I put it back in my bag.  You see, my flight wasn’t that long, but with the initial take-off period where you can’t use electronics and the landing period where you can’t use them, I didn’t have very much time to watch the movie on the way there… and really, who is going to sit in their hotel room after arriving in Vegas to watch Get Smart on their PSP?  Not me, I can assure you.

I completely forgot about the movie until it was time to go home.  Sure enough, Sony means business when they say “24 hour viewing window” as you’re greeted with a nice warning that the content had expired.  I’ll probably wait until Get Smart hits one of the free cable networks before I watch it again, but I can definitely tell you I’d rent a movie from the PS Video Store again if my viewing conditions warranted it (and if I happened upon an 8GB or 16GB memory stick, I’d consider loading up a few movies before a trip!)  The nice thing about the viewing windows is they don’t start until you start viewing them… so you could theoretically pick up a few movies and save some for the trip home.

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