PSP Technical Questions

[prchulo]

Hello iam thinking of getting this mpeg recorder 2 because i have a psp and looks like good adition. I want to get it but there are some reasons   that are making me hesitate. Well the first and the main reason is that from what i have seen is that the highest bit  rate for recording with the neuros recoder 2 for the psp is 768 but the psp can handle i think up to 1500 bit rate so why is there only 768 option. Are they going to change this soon and also is this recoder 2 going to support AVC which is supported by the psp. Next when you record a movie does it have an option to remove the black bars on the movie. Last when recording from tv can you choose what channel to record from. If anyone can answer any of these questions i would be very greatfull, because iam really eager to get this recorder and i have to know these answers before i buy this. THANKS.

[neo979]

Hello prchulo.

The Neuroses do not have a built-in tuner. So it is up to whatever tuner product you connect it to (VCR, cable box, etc.) to choose the channel or schedule channel changes.

Other than that, your expectations don't really match a realistic understanding of how TV ripping works - it is not "he who dies with the highest bit rate wins." If a bit rate is high enough to replicate the source faithfully, then it is a waste of space to increase it beyond that. I don't think the N2's bit rate will ever be substantially altered, since this would require new hardware (unless it was built with extra processing power that it's not using).

It also doesn't make sense to "remove black bars" from a movie. If the aspect ratio of a movie causes it to be letterboxed on a given display, then you can't just get rid of the space without either chopping off pieces of the visible area or stretching the image, to the extent that the results would look awful. When Hollywood movies are "formatted for your screen," it is because a human actually goes through and chooses where to zoom in for each portion of the movie ("pan and scan"). A computer could never determine where the critical portion of the screen is, and even P&S; movies sometimes lack nuances that would've been nice to keep.

[misfit5]

Gotta agree with neo---the settings available for recordings viewed on the psp are fine. The quality comes out great for watching on the train, plane, or whatever. It's a great gadget.

[neo979]

I have actually read that, in 1997, some people were hugely impressed at some new ships and details in The Empire Strikes Back (and possibly also ANH and ROTJ)... which weren't actually new. People just didn't recognize them because only a lame pan & scan version had been available for the ~20 years prior to that, and these details were lost in that version.