Moving to memory stick is a no brainer. At the very least, the battery life will increase since you dont need to power the drive now. I always thought UMD was a odd decision.

Sometimes odd decisions can take the world by storm....not in this case though

Any idea why the movies are in a lower res than the psp screen can handle ?

My guess is disc space limitations.

My guess is "Sony wanted to kick PSP owners one last time."

Isn't that a limitation that they enforced when viewing video from a memory stick? I thought they did this to entice people to buy their UMDs... if so, they should get rid of that "feature" now.

Exactly. There is no reason for them to continue to restrict the resolution of memory stick video other than the fact that they are clueless. If they do open it up to the full resolution of the PSP I expect them to only allow it for DRM video from their connect site, but hopefully someone can hack that if it happens to allow it for everything.

I'd start keeping an eye on Big Lots for them- I got a few black & white VideoNow discs from them, even a couple D-VHS movies!

Maybe that hidden landfill where Atari dumped all those copies of E.T. for the 2600?

Boy, that game really sucked.

The delivery implementation of this is beyond stupid. On the other hand, they did mention the memory sticks will not cost any more than the sticks did before. So, really, what you're doing is buying an overpriced memory stick that now has a free movie instead of just an overpriced memory stick.

Considering that the game was programmed by 1 guy and done in 5 weeks, I think that's pretty impressive. He also did Indiana Jones and Yar's Revenge for the 2600, so he can make good games

Not to hijack my own thread but my friends and I booted up Indiana Jones on his old 2600 about 6 years ago and we couldn't get off the first screen

Almost everyone sounds so surprised. Why? This is typical Sony business practice. They always try to come up with their own proprietary storage medium. Let's take a look:

Betamax.....R.I.P.
SACD.........if not already, will soon R.I.P.
UMD..........R.I.P.
BluRay.......??? (though company track record suggests the way of the dodo)

They need to just to push out a PSP2 earlier, the PSPOne from a gaming POV has been a huge clusterfuck.

You forgot MiniDisc.

People need to stop thinking of copyright infringement in these uses as legal and illegal. All the laws were written for "phono-records" and have carried over to a set of circumstances where everything is data and people own a whole range of devices that they want to make interact with their media.

The law on fair uses is this:

A non-commerical nature is a necessary but insufficient to achieve a fair use.

That said, when CD burners came out, the stereo component burners were unambiguously sold with the suggestion of making mix-tape discs, either for personal use or as gifts. Apple had an ad campaign with the slogan "Rip. Mix. Burn."

In the Betamax case, which permits the manufacture and sale of all recordable media players the court allowed devices to go to market because they had substantial noninfringing purposes, even though allowing these products to market meant that a lot of infringement would accompany the uses of these devices by people who would not infringe but for the devices.

With CD burners, the music industry took a different tactic; They lobbied Congress to pass a law wherein the right of rightsholders to seek redress for non-commercial copying was waived and a royalty was paid to the recording industry for blank media sold, and all the burners were equipped with SCMS technology which prevented second generation digital copies.

If you remember the early days of CD-R, there used to be "audio" and "data" CD-Rs. These were actually the same, except that a royalty was paid on "audio" discs. Also, computer-based CD-writers were not equipped with SCMS, because the data-storage capabilities of writable discs.

A lot of people were confused about the copyright implications of a CD-burner at the time it came out. As a practical matter, the burners could not be enjoined from release because of Betamax, and the right to attempt to curb infringing use with lawsuits was worthless as a practical matter. So they waived the worthless rights in exchange for the royalty and the copy protection. (you'll have to pardon me if any of my details are slightly off. I looked into this in 1998 when I bought a minidisc recorder, and I am recounting from memory).

A lot of people believed and still believe that it is okay to copy a CD if you own it, and if it is for personal use. In fact, neither of those factors matters at all, because there is no "backup" or "personal use" implied in fair use. Many software licenses explicitly grant users to make a backup copy, and that may be where this originates from, and if the use was strictly for backup purposes, it might be considered "fair" anyway, but if they did sue individuals for copying, this would almost certainly not be tested because the case would probably settle very early.

In fact, under the AHRA, you can burn discs with impunity and give them to whoever you want. You can borrow your friends' CDs and burn copies. You can burn CDs and then sell the originals to used record stores. What matters is that it's done on an SCMS enabled burner, because that's the condition that the waiver of the right to sue is based on. Of course, most people burn CDs on their computers rather than on component stereos now, so most burned CDs are infringing and preserve the right to sue.

Shifting a CD to your iPod may be a fair use, and reasonably it should be. I would suppose that the legitimate "time-shifting" purpose for making a copy in Betamax might support a "device shifting" fair use of the iPod and PSP, but as far as I know, the issue has not been addressed.

Also , now you run into the resolution problem that the movies from the memory stick are of lower resolution than UMD's so the picture will suffer.

Now the dvd quality format they push will be a bit lower now that it is on memory stick (and the quality is still not that bad... but .. still)

Sony just needs to understand that they suck as of right now. And I’m talking as a whole, psp, blue ray, ps3 etc. This movie thing is just another way to draw people in when they see a new product on the shelf and have no idea and are going "oh movies. I like movies. I'll try this thing out." They had their time in the lime light it’s over. Nintendo makes a better hand held product the DS and Microsoft makes a better console the 360.

Sony has always had problems with trying to push their crappy media formats on people, I mean look at mini disc.

I mean the design team and the people in charge there should take the honorable way out for a Japanese company. A self inflicted dagger wound to the stomach to die a slow and painful honorable death.

Everyone be on the lookout for those discounted UMDs and keep us posted.

Wow, I guess people didn't really want to watch movies on a 4 inch screen.

UMDs were a dumb idea.

Selling $100 memory sticks with a movie on it is an really dumb idea.

What will they think of next? A $600 console?

LOL Of course

Mike I hope your being serious, and not funny or else my post is going to look idiotic, but I actually like these things and when I see the price go way down (where they should have priced them to begin with) I will DEFINATLY be snagging them up, I already own quite a few.....

heh, don't see why people get all worked up over a format whether a success or not. i have a few umd movies b/c i'm too lazy to transfer movies to a memory stick. other than that, no skin off of my nose if umd movies fail. (i hope umd games get better and more prevalent though). i, too, will be looking out for cheap umd movies

here's a doom and gloom article i found about dvd while looking for past format wars... :P
http://www.robertsdvd.com/failure.html

"DVD is just a bad idea. It is being forced upon a uncaring and unwanted public and is an inferior product that simply isn't needed or desired."

I'm definitely being serious. I have a small collection and as noted above, they are great for the kids.