I noted the other day that the BBC had launched “vodcasts” of some of its news programming including a weekly Newsnight summary. I also mentioned that it was disappointing that the BBC hadn’t made the format available as anything other than an iPod friendly mp4.
Well of course mp4 files play on plenty of hardware. But trying to play it on my PSP was a struggle.
However, Sony has now released another update to its software – version 2.80 – which gets around this problem. You can now drop mp4 files into a VIDEO folder in the root of your Memory Stick Duo, and they’ll play. You don’t even have to rename them something strange, or drop them into some bizarrely named folder depending on the encoder used as you used to.
It’s worth noting that you do need to use the root of your PSP, not a PSP/VIDEO folder as I first thought. But the Newsnight video works and plenty of other videos formatted for iPod should too – as long as they’re not encoded as .mov files I believe.