2.80 plays 480×272, if it’s Motion JPEG

When PSP-Vault tooled with the video functions of Sony‘s Firmware 2.80 for the PSP, finding that its video playbacks were limited to a rather smallish 320×240 pix rather than the 480×272 the screen can handle, they missed out on something. zmcnulty found out just recently that 2.80 CAN play 480×272 vids without the need of homebrew. If the vid was encoded in Motion JPEG, that is.

Motion JPEG is a video made up of a flipbook of JPEG stills – literally. Many digicams still use Motion JPEG as their video capture format since, well, the camera’s set to cap JPEG stills anyway. There is a big disadvantage to using Motion JPEG formats, however: they’re huge. By way of example, zmcnulty converted a 40-second, 2MB XviD file into Motion JPEG, and it ended up taking 20MB. Guess we’ll be needing more Memory Sticks…

And there’s one other thing zmcnulty’s wondering about: Why didn’t Sony publicize this? He says,

That’s an excellent question, and one I’m struggling with myself. Perhaps the same reason many speculate they have disabled the playback of 480 x 272 video in MPEG-4 or AVC/H.264: they don’t want to hurt sales of UMD-Video.

Of course, there are reasons why some people won’t update to 2.80+…

When PSP-Vault tooled with the video functions of Sony‘s Firmware 2.80 for the PSP, finding that its video playbacks were limited to a rather smallish 320×240 pix rather than the 480×272 the screen can handle, they missed out on something. zmcnulty found out just recently that 2.80 CAN play 480×272 vids without the need of homebrew. If the vid was encoded in Motion JPEG, that is.

Motion JPEG is a video made up of a flipbook of JPEG stills – literally. Many digicams still use Motion JPEG as their video capture format since, well, the camera’s set to cap JPEG stills anyway. There is a big disadvantage to using Motion JPEG formats, however: they’re huge. By way of example, zmcnulty converted a 40-second, 2MB XviD file into Motion JPEG, and it ended up taking 20MB. Guess we’ll be needing more Memory Sticks…

And there’s one other thing zmcnulty’s wondering about: Why didn’t Sony publicize this? He says,

That’s an excellent question, and one I’m struggling with myself. Perhaps the same reason many speculate they have disabled the playback of 480 x 272 video in MPEG-4 or AVC/H.264: they don’t want to hurt sales of UMD-Video.

Of course, there are reasons why some people won’t update to 2.80+…