M²Convert Review

M²Convert for the PSP is a nice little program for anyone who wants to watch movies on their PSP. It’s not a high-end video editing suite, but what it does – convert videos for play on your PSP – it does quite well.

M²Convert has a very simple interface that lets you specify which video files on your computer you’d like to convert and transfer. You can also pop in a DVD movie and convert that for play on your PSP. For DVDs the software will allow you to transfer individual chapters which is great when you just want to pull a single episode off of a TV series DVD. You can also select which of the DVD’s available audio tracks you’d like to transfer. This can be a lifesaver for foreign language DVDs that play in their original language by default. Who wants to read subtitles on the PSP’s small screen?

Once you have your videos selected you just need to tell M²Convert where to put them. If you’ve connected your PSP to a USB port, just specify the drive letter assigned to your PSP and you’re ready to go. The software will take care of putting everything into the right place in the PSP’s complicated folder structure.

M²Convert supports both MP4 and H.264 video formats for output, the former being faster to write and the latter providing greater compression. You can let the software auto size the video resolution or specify it yourself. You can also select from three quality levels if space is more of a concern for you than video quality. With the default settings an average feature film will fit into about 512 MB of space on your memory stick. Converting movies is not the fastest process in the world, as it takes about an hour and fifteen minutes to an hour and a half to convert and transfer each hour of video at the highest quality level. M²Convert doesn’t have a large footprint, though, and I was able to leave it in the background converting away without a noticeable performance hit on my system.

As for the transferred videos, they looked just fine when played on a PSP. TV shows were played with a black border by default, but were easy enough to bring to full screen with the PSP’s zoom feature without a serious degradation in video quality. Overall I’m happy to use M²Convert to watch some of my DVDs when I’m traveling. After spending some time converting them and storing them on the computer, I can just pick a couple that I want to watch, transfer them to my 4 GB memory stick, and take them with me. It’s hard not to be happy that with M²Convert I do not have to buy duplicate copies of my favorite movies just to have them on UMD.

Final Rating: If you don’t need video editing or library management features, M²Convert is an excellent choice for transferring DVDs and video files to your PSP.