Japanese firm to sell PSP-friendly movies online

While those of us with imported PSPs struggle to encode or transcode videos into the PSP-friendly MPEG-4 format, one Japanese firm is preparing to start selling suitably encoded movies this Christmas Eve.

PDA Cinema Contents, which distributes stuff via its website, is preparing to make four Japanese-language films available for less than €3 each. If you can speak Japanese enough to navigate the website, you can probably even buy them outside Japan paying with your credit card.

The movies can then be downloaded to the PSP's Memory Stick Duo. By creating a USB connection with your desktop PC using an appropriate cable (the USB cable that came with our Sony CyberShot digi-cams works just fine) you can copy files into an appropriate directory without even removing the Memory Stick from the PSP slot.

You should be able to get your grubby digi-hands on them from December 24th. Just keep an eye open here.

There's currently no word on when and how Sony plans to start selling movies on its UMD format, but for now at least shovelling your own stuff and this sort of premium content there by hand is the best you're likely to do. UMD movies are expected to look a lot better than MPEG-4 encodes, mind. We shall see in the new year.