It’s that time of year again – everyone’s off on their summer holidays. For a lot of people obsessed with tech, gadgets can be a tricky, and sometimes expensive, thing to take with you.
For example, for my two week break, my flight bag will be containing my iPhone, iPod (and chargers), Nintendo DS (and charger), headphones, Sony e-reader, camera (plus memory cards and chargers)… then my fiance will be having her phone, camera, MP3 player, and all of the chargers associated with those. Oh, and don’t forget something like a Powermonkey for those really long flights (9-10 hours to the Dominican will really take it out of your iPhone battery!)
But aside from all of the wire spaghetti that our flight bags will have, what happens when you’re actually away? Despite the improvements that have been made in on-board entertainment, unless you fancy paying through the nose to use whatever video game system your airline deems to be “cool”, chances are you’ll be left either reading a book (which will eat into your baggage allowance) or watch a crappy movie in unison with hundreds of other passengers. That’s something that really irks me when I know that back home, my DVD collection stretches into hundreds of DVDS. None of which will be at my fingertips for the next week or two.
Now, for the remainder of the holiday, that doesn’t bother me, but for the many hours that you’re cooped up on a plane with nothing to do… it really does. So for this holiday, I thought, why not try and bring at least some of your DVD collection with you? Of course, there’s no plans to bring a pile of shiny discs and a DVD player in my suitcase, but with things like Handbrake and DVD Decrypter, ripping a DVD onto your iPhone is fairly straightforward to do. Shame it takes over an hour per movie to do!
Why the iPhone? Well, having access to a PSP, I will say that the screen on that device is much better for watching movies. Problem is, it’s so damn proprietary.
#
Of course, the PSP’s main format is the UMD (unless you’re working with a PSP Go, in which case I’d book an appointment with a psychologist pretty quickly!). So if you want to (legally) watch a movie on your PSP after forking out for a DVD or BluRay of it, you need to shell out again for a UMD. Except those kinda bombed, and there are scant new movies being released on UMD. So you’ve got to go the iPhone route – rip and convert – before bunging it onto a memory card in your PSP to watch.
One of the saving graces of owning a 32Gb iPhone and a separate iPod is that I can treat one device for games and movies, and another for music – but surely we are at the point in technology (DRM or not) where there really can be a one-size-fits-all device, which allows you to play games and watch/listen to music and movies that you already own on DVD or CD without having to be a tech head and run numerous programes to move things from a DVD to whatever format you need.
After all this encoding, I’m going to need a holiday just to get over it!
