X-oom Movies on PSP

Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP) can play movies, music and photos as well as games. The console is already supported by a fine selection of commercially available movie and TV titles available in its own UMD (Universal Media Disc) format. But, at £20 a pop, it's not a cost-effective method of getting video content onto your PSP.

It is possible to transfer media from your PC directly to the PSP by using a Memory Stick memory card and playing it back from there. However, while it's relatively simple to dump MP3s and JPEGs onto the PSP's memory, it's notoriously difficult to transfer movies. X-oom's Movies on PSP is a cracking little program that makes the whole process an absolute breeze.

Simply pop a DVD into the PC, or browse for a movie file on your hard disk, and Movies on PSP handles the rest. Effectively, it encodes movies into a file format (MP4) that the PSP can understand, taking into account all the PSP's strict file-name and folder rules.

You'll need a special USB cable to actually get the files onto your PSP, and Sony doesn't provide one with the PSP so you'll have to buy one separately for about £5.

Movies can also be compressed to fit on a Memory Stick. Of course, the smaller the file, the bigger the compression, leading to a trade-off in image quality. It's a useful feature nonetheless, particularly if you're stuck with a small memory card.

There are a number of freeware programs that do a similar job for free. Admittedly, many of these are much more complex to use than this program, which really does take the sting out of the experience.

The biggest problem with the software is that it can't rip movies from shop-bought DVDs and convert them to the PSP format, mainly because it is illegal to make copies of DVD movies even for personal use.

Transferring footage from home-made DVDs or digital video files you have on your hard disk, however, is extremely simple.