Easy video onto the PSP?

July 9, 2007 5:38 AM

I have a PSP and would like to download YouTube videos so I can watch them on my commute. This brings up a number of questions...

I want to make this a daily thing--watching the news on the train. This news junky needs his fix, and the morning commute is the best time do it.

First off, I'd like to download political videos--clips from U.S. news shows, debate, etc. Other than the politics category at YouTube, are there any other sites I can download videos of this kind? .mp4 files are ideal, but anything I can download would be fine. If you've got a video iPod, then PSPs use the same .mp4 format.

And perhaps most importantly, is there a decent Firefox downloader for video files? I have a Firefox extension called Download Helper and another called FlashGot, but can't get either of them to download a batch of video files located on one page.

Having this process be as automated as possible is ideal. Yet another question I have is the .mp4 format for the PSP--Sony goes out of their way to make sure putting video on your PSP is as painful a process as possible. I can convert downloaded .flv files with PSP Video 9, but it's extremely time-consuming. Any REALLY simple way to get YouTube videos (along with the necessary THM files) onto my PSP?

Thanks for reading the whole thing!

posted by zardoz to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

You can use Democracy player to download Youtube files. It saves them as .flv files, which I'm sure you can convert to mp4 . Not sure if there's an option to save files directly to mp4.
posted by Happy Dave at 6:28 AM on July 9, 2007

To convert .flv files to PSP (and just about any other format), look at Super from erightsoft.com It's one of the best free converter programs out there.
posted by worker_bee at 6:38 AM on July 9, 2007

Tubesock my friend, Tubesock.
posted by 4ster at 7:34 AM on July 9, 2007

i'm sure you could figure out a way to automate something with this: http://vixy.net/

it does psp, among others.
posted by klanawa at 8:36 AM on July 9, 2007

In Google Video you can download any video on there to psp format. Might be easier to find the videos you want on there instead of d/l them on youtube and converting them to psp mp4.
posted by Dreamghost at 10:30 AM on July 9, 2007

For batch downloading with Firefox I recommend downthemall.
posted by gergtreble at 2:11 PM on July 9, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks for the responses, everyone. As I pointed out earlier, Sony forces PSP users to take an extra step and create a thumbnail image to go along with the .mp4. Also, the names of both files must be a specific naming convention. It's mindblowingly stupid of Sony, because the PSP has the best video playback of any handheld device...yes, even better than the iPhone, a couple years ahead of it. Nobody knows this because Sony is so afraid of piracy that they cripple their own products.

/rant

Thanks again, everyone! keep 'em coming (though that's a longshot, yeah?)
posted by zardoz at 6:13 PM on July 9, 2007

That super video converter looks sketchy. Wander through pages coated with google ads looking for a semi-hidden link. Enable javascript, disable zone alarm, clear cache? Um, no thanks. Looks like such a setup. And yet, there appear to be heaps of happy users out there. What gives?
posted by thenormshow at 10:49 PM on September 9, 2007