Hitchhiker's on Euro UMD

As the European launch of the PSP draws ever nearer, Buena Vista Home Entertainment has declared itself the first movie distributor to support the UMD format in the UK.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will go on sale alongside the PSP come September 1, with a raft of titles promised to follow.

"The arrival of film on UMD is the most exciting development in the home entertainment arena since the arrival of DVD some seven years ago," Buena Vista's Julie Sneddon told The Sun.

"The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is a great choice for our first simultaneous DVD and UMD release here in the UK."

There's no official word on what other titles we can look forward to from BV, but they've already released the likes of Kill Bill, Hero and Pirates of the Caribbean on UMD over in the States.

Sony has previously confirmed that Europeans who buy a handheld at launch will get a free copy of Spider-Man 2 on UMD.

However, unlike in the US, it won't come bundled in the box - instead you'll have to register your console at yourpsp.com, and then Ken Kutaragi himself will pop one in an envelope and stick it in the post for you. Possibly.

But if you don't like the sound of UMD at all, you might be interested in the new Movies on PSP software from X-OOM. It enables quick conversions of DVDs to DivX, AVI, WMV, MPEG and the like so save them to Memory Stick, ready for watching on the go.

Course, you could just do this yourself, as we pointed out a while back.

But Movies on PSP is designed to make the whole thing a lot easier and also includes something called 'Fit-to-stick' technology, which means it'll resize movie files according to the storage capacity of your Memory Stick - so you can watch films "in the best possible picture and audio quality." Movies on PSP is out on August 12, priced £24.99.