Well if your like me, there are times when you just want to pack as much audio and video onto your PSP as possible. I do the odd flight across the Atlantic and at these times its more important to fit as much video and audio onto the machine as possible at an acceptable loss of quality. In these situations, that extra episode of lost or boston legal is a valuable chunk taken off the monotony of the long haul flight.
It's not too complicated to reduce the overall size of your video files, you have to chunk down the bitrate. This of course should strike fear into you, i think we have all seen how unwatchable video can be at a low bitrate, luckily for us AVC has a few extras to sooth our pain. The PSP can now also handle a lot more variation in the audio for our video files, the best news being how it now can handle AAC HE+PS. AAC is a great codec anyway, but this has previously been limited to LC (low complexity). HE (high efficiency) is much more efficient at lower bitrates, ideal for those of us who want to reduce the overall file size. The PSP also handles HE+ PS, which is parametric stereo and i believe this kicks in at 48Kbps and below. Basically, for the end user, we can use very low bitrate and still keep the quality upto an acceptable level.
Of course the holy grail
is tiny file size and great quality, but a trade off will have to be made. This
is more about keeping that trade off to a minimum, so the quality of the video
and audio is not so low as to affect enjoyment of the video.
To make this simple, ive included my profiles for low bitrate audio and video on
the main page so if you want the quick solution, just go
download those.
For more detail, carry on reading. Normally i would select some of the faster x264 options for regular video, but as we are trying to squeeze as much quality out of the file as possible, ive chosen the slower options, such as RDO level 2 and exhaustive for M.E. I personally think its worth enabling these settings even if the increase is only minimal, when your dropping the bitrate as low as we are, you need all the help you can get.
I also set the bitrate for video to 180 and use AAC HE + PS as 48 and this gives me files of a low enough size, but still watchable without a problem. I can usuallly fit a 90 minute movie into around 150mb, so that would give me about 6 films to watch, or 12 45 min shows, very nice!
One extra option you could play with is the deblock filter.
Normally the values are set to 0,0 which is fine for normal encodes. For us
though, you could try increasing the numbers. The higher the value, the greater
the deblock strength. This could be very handy for us where our low bitrates
causes blocking. This will of course reduce the detail level, but 2,2 is
sometimes a good compromise as the blocks from low bitrates can be very
distracting. This is a not a total fix but can make your videos slightly easier
on the eye if blocks distract you as much as they do me. Try it on a short clip
and see what you think.
That will do for now!