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Feb 08 2007
Instant Video To-Go Review
PSP Hardware Review | Video
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| Summary: Useless waste of money!
1
I thought this might be a pretty decent product if it even kind of lived up to it's claims. At fifty bucks after the mail in rebate, I thought it might be okay to take the risk.
Nope!
Things were looking good in the beginning. I got ground shipping from Tigerdirect.com but it still came in only two days. The installation was a snap, taking only minutes to get up and running. I have many hundreds of videos to use so I grabbed a good one to test with.
The encoding was indeed pretty fast. To do it you just choose the device (in this case the PSP) from the list of supported devices and then choose a quality setting. The first video I tried was about one hour and fourteen minutes long. At high quality, it took this device and it's software about 22 minutes to encode. Three times faster than real time is pretty good based on some of the times I've gotten with various software encoders. I thought that was pretty good so I tried the same video on low quality. It was only marginally faster at 18 minutes, but it was faster.
It was time to give them a try so I connected my PSP and copied the files over. I disconnected, and went in to the videos and tried to play one. It looked like it was going to play for about a second then an error came up about this video cannot be played. That was the high quality one so I tried the low quality version with the same result. I tried encoding other files of various size and original formats. None of them would play.
My PSP firmware is at 3.01 so I think that should be fine. I had the software check for updates and there was one, but the videos I made after the update didn't play either. The videos play fine on my computer in Quicktime so it had to be the encoding. I know the PSP can be a little picky about stuff, but with the same settings as low quality, PSP Video 9 movies play on the PSP just fine. The high quality settings are a little weird with the frame rate at 30.00 fps, but video done at 15.00 fps won't play either.
You also can't make a lot of adjustments to the encoding settings. I'm really wondering why you are stuck at 320x240. I'd like to know why 29.97 fps can't be chosen. These seemed like good questions for ArcSoft, the manufacturer, so I registered the software and checked out their support. None of these issues (and little else regarding the PSP) was in their knowledge base. They do provide email support for supported software so I logged into the site and tried to do that. Apparently, this device and it's software does not have email support.
I have come to the sad realization that I have paid $76.00 with shipping for something that serves me absolutely no purpose at all. At least I may get some of my money back after the rebate.
DO NOT BUY THIS THING! I don't care how long it takes my PC to transcode videos in software. At least I can play the videos on my PSP.
REVIEW IT
PRODUCT INFO
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Comments
Thanks for the review and sorry to hear that this device is another one of those that says it can do something and ends up not doing it at all. Whether it's software or hardware, when it seems a little too hard to believe, it usually is. I too sometimes take a company's claim to be truth (which we all should be able to), but, like cases as this, it never fails that a company says they have something cool and it fails miserably. If anything, they are selling a product while it's being beta tested and you've paid them to beta test their product. Not cool. Complain loudly enough until you get your money back.
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Thanks for this review. I was really thinking about getting this. Definitely will not now!
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Dude...once you did your firmware update did you format your memory stick...It is not compatible with older firmware.
But with newer firmware you need to format the memory stick after the firmware udpate.
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i have to dissagree with "theazhrei" about buyin this product.
i recently bought this just so i can put movies on psp, but i wanted more than that if i am payin 60 bucks. it does cut the encodeing time in half or maybe less as compare to software base encoders. and it did work on my psp. i understand theazhrei's problem but it can be fixed with lil computer knowgle. theazhrei said "I'd like to know why 29.97 fps can't be chosen" , to fix that just edit any profiles with wat ever setting you want, go to install directory and find profile folder .. in that back up any profiles you want and then edit it. to do that open file of choice which ends with .apr using notepad or other text editors. as you can see arcsoft wont let you use encoder "instant video to-go" for "MPEG-4 Encoded AVI File" just edit the file and you will have "instant video to go" doin the hard work for you. this is most defintely good buy for any kinds of encoding .. since it only uses about 20 to 30% of cup when encoding.
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