Sony Rolls Out Memory Stick Entertainment Packs
$60 gets you a 2GB Memory Stick and a free movie. Not bad, except...
Published: May 8, 2007
From the moment the PSP was properly unveiled, it has been pushed by Sony Computer Entertainment America as a movie/music player as much as a games machine, and it does both quite well. Still, cramming a bunch of movies onto a Memory Stick was an expensive concept at launch. Now? Not so much. Solid state storage prices have plummeted over the past couple years, culminating in gigabytes of storage for just double-digit dollar amounts.
What does that mean for PSP owners looking for a bunch of space to pack all those movies, pictures, music and game downloads? Well, if you go the official route, it means for a hair under $60, you can have the new Memory Stick Entertainment Pack, which gets you a 2GB Memory Stick Pro DUO and your choice of one of four movies pre-loaded onto an accompanying DVD; Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, S.W.A.T., Spider-Man 2 and Hellboy.
So how well does it work? We decided to take the whole package for a spin, picking Hellboy as our movie of choice. So long as you have an internet-enabled PC with Internet Explorer 6.0 Service Pack 1 or later as your default (yes, really), copying the movie over is as simple as a few clicks and punching in the code that comes on the back of the DVD case. The DRM is authorized the AVC-formatted movie is prepped and after an ActiveX applet is installed (now you know why IE is required), and the file starts moving over.
It took just a couple of minutes via the USB 2.0 cable we had (it's not included, so we just used our PS3 one), and about 800 megabytes later, we had our video. Except... there were some issues. Not with playback or transfer or authorization, mind you, but in the video itself. For whatever retarded reason, it was decided that those 800 megabytes should add up to an hour and a half movie at 320x180 (by contrast, UMD movies are actually higher resolution than the PSP's 480x272 screen and can look fantastic). Hellboy was reduced to a stretched, slightly blurry mess of a movie, and while it didn't kill the fact that the movie itself is actually pretty good, it did kill some of the cooler special effects shots in it. Shame.
Still, if you have $60 burning a hole in your pocket and you need an instant movie fix, you can go from ripping open the finger-slicing blister pack to watching a new movie on the PSP in about 10 minutes. No programs to install, and hey, you've still got more than a gig of space left on the stick. Or you can delete the free movie, rip it yourself and enjoy it at near-full resolution.
What does that mean for PSP owners looking for a bunch of space to pack all those movies, pictures, music and game downloads? Well, if you go the official route, it means for a hair under $60, you can have the new Memory Stick Entertainment Pack, which gets you a 2GB Memory Stick Pro DUO and your choice of one of four movies pre-loaded onto an accompanying DVD; Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, S.W.A.T., Spider-Man 2 and Hellboy.
So how well does it work? We decided to take the whole package for a spin, picking Hellboy as our movie of choice. So long as you have an internet-enabled PC with Internet Explorer 6.0 Service Pack 1 or later as your default (yes, really), copying the movie over is as simple as a few clicks and punching in the code that comes on the back of the DVD case. The DRM is authorized the AVC-formatted movie is prepped and after an ActiveX applet is installed (now you know why IE is required), and the file starts moving over.
It took just a couple of minutes via the USB 2.0 cable we had (it's not included, so we just used our PS3 one), and about 800 megabytes later, we had our video. Except... there were some issues. Not with playback or transfer or authorization, mind you, but in the video itself. For whatever retarded reason, it was decided that those 800 megabytes should add up to an hour and a half movie at 320x180 (by contrast, UMD movies are actually higher resolution than the PSP's 480x272 screen and can look fantastic). Hellboy was reduced to a stretched, slightly blurry mess of a movie, and while it didn't kill the fact that the movie itself is actually pretty good, it did kill some of the cooler special effects shots in it. Shame.
Still, if you have $60 burning a hole in your pocket and you need an instant movie fix, you can go from ripping open the finger-slicing blister pack to watching a new movie on the PSP in about 10 minutes. No programs to install, and hey, you've still got more than a gig of space left on the stick. Or you can delete the free movie, rip it yourself and enjoy it at near-full resolution.
