PSP UMD Movies – Not Worth Your Money?
November 22nd, 2006By Nash Burns
The Sony PSP utilizes the so called UMD disc for gaming and for watching movies. UMD stands for Universal Media Disc that is the media format for PSP (apart from its memory stick). A PSP UMD Movie will typically set you back between $18 to $30 USD which is quite hefty especially for student and teenagers. Nowadays, the demography of people using PSP includes young professional where money is not so much an issue. But for teenager, it is a big deal to fork out $30 for a movie you only watch once in a while.
The UMD is similar in construction to your typical Compact Disc (CD) with the difference in the size of the disc. The maximum data that a UMD can hold is 1.8GB which is more than enough to hold a whole movie at a lower resolution than your typical DVD. Due to the capacity of the disc, bonus feature that you can get from normal DVD are sometime remove and like the normal DVD, it is prone to scratches.
The sale of PSP UMD Movies has also started to dwindle mainly due to lack of interest from customers. Big names movie companies such as Paramount, Warner and Sony Picture are cutting back releases due to lack of sales. Things are not looking so hot for PSP UMD Movies. Some of the contributions to this lack of sales are due to the price of the UMD Movies. Frankly speaking, they are highly overpriced and sometimes more expensive than DVD.
If you are like me, you would start looking for alternatives. All of us (well, most of us anyway) love to watch movies on our PSP but with the high UMD movies pricing and the limited number of movies available, the future of watching movie on our PSP is started to look bleak. Or is it?
If you like to watch movies on your PSP there are two alternatives. 1) You buy an original DVD and you ripped the DVD into your computer and download it into your memory stick 2) You become a member of PSP downloading site and download directly from that site.
DVD ripping software is provided by Sony. It enables you to extract DVD movies into your PC (or Mac) into a much more compact format. Of course you would loose a small bit of quality but since your PSP screen is small, there are no noticeable difference. The drawback to either of the method is that you would require significant amount of memory in your memory stick (at least 512MB)
The second method is by joining the numerous PSP download site available in the internet nowadays. Finding a download site is the easy part. Finding a good site is the tricky bit. The good thing about downloading from these membership site is that you don’t have to do any DVD ripping which is in itself can be time consuming at the very best and downright frustrating if you don’t get it right. You just download and watch the movies. The only thing that will cost you is the lifetime membership charges. Look at it this way, by the time you download a full movie, you’ll already cover the membership charges and you can download unlimited number of files and have access to games cheat, review and get free PSP tools too. You can always store your movie files on your PC and download the movie onto your memory stick if you want to watch them
The PSP UMD movies are fast becoming scarce but they are still there in the market. However, things are not looking so bright for them. PSP download sites offers a great alternative for PSP movie lovers but the drawback is the amount memory you would require if you want to watch more than one movie at a time. In the end it always comes to what your needs or wants are.
