Having received a PSP Slim for my birthday and as I’m now taking the train to work much more than I was, it seemed a good time to look at getting some TV/Video on to my PSP.  There’s stacks of information on the web but much of it was related to either old firmware versions (things seemed to change in the mid 2.x series) or related to encoders that had long since died.

Media center records programmes in the DVR-MS format, essentially MPEG2 with some additional metadata.  There are a number of utilities which are available that allow you to suitable encode your dvr-ms files, the most popular looks to be PSP Video 9.  If you’re after a GUI based solution then that looks like a good bet but I was after something a little simpler, PSP Video 9 is a little heavy weight for me in this case.

Here’s a really simple option:

1.  Download mencoder (specifically this version has DVRMS support built in)

2.  From a command-line, navigate to your mencoder directory (or alternatively add mencoder to your path) and type:

mencoder {path-to-dvrms-file} –profile PSP-fast –o {path-to-output-mp4-file}

3.  On your PSP, create a directory ‘VIDEO’ (note the caps) in the root of your PSP’s memory card

4.  Copy your *.mp4 files in to the video directory on your PSP, they should then be accessible from within your PSP video menu

Older firmware versions required a different directory and naming structure but these steps will work on the latest firmware versions and it will of course also work for the Media Center Vista edition.