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I received an e-mail from Sony last week offering a discounted price for their new PSP Media Manager Version 2. Touting new web browser sychro features and improved DVD functionality among others, I dove right in. Having owned the original PSP Media Manager and being someone who uses my PSP as al multimedia device when my gaming is done, I was wanted to see what Sony came up with this time around.

If Sony plans to use a future version of this Media Manager software to connect their PS3 to my PC, that’s good news, because Sony’s actually done their homework this time. The application has improved in every way, but it’s not without it’s faults.

The Interface

For those familiar with the original Media Manager, the layout of the application in 2.0 is significantly more intuitive and attractive than before. You can now opt for two different skins, Light and Dark. The “Light” display does have a somewhat iTunes look to it (I still prefer the dark blue and black skin, I hate iTunes). The Media Manager is now truly split horizontally across the screen, the top half being your PC and the bottom half being your PSP. Dragging and dropping is still in effect here, although you’ll still probably find yourself highlighting files from above and clicking the transfer arrows to push files to the PSP. You should no longer experience as significant a delay when navigating between sections and keeping it running on your desktop when not in use on a mid to low-end PC won’t bog Windows XP to a crawl as it did before.

Web Browser Support

Version 2 now allows you to create and edit your PSP web browser bookmarks and easily transfer them into your PSP. Ironically, it’ll only recognize bookmarks from Internet Explorer, so avid FIrefox users will have to export your bookmarks to a file then import them into Internet Explorer. This only takes a few seconds to complete, but it would’ve been nice to have Firefox compatibility out of the box. This isn’t the only time that Media Manager is relying on Microsoft software to perform. The application is also still a Windows only app, Linux and Mac users need not apply.

Document Support

A big update to the Media Manager is document support. When coupled with Microsoft Office 2003 or newer, you can encode Office Word documents and spreadsheets into HTML for easy viewing in the PSP’s web browser. The Manager actually creates an .htm file in your COMMON folder on the PSP, which easily allows you to navigate to the document file you’re looking for…..in theory. I was never able to actually load this .htm page in the PSP’s browser, receiving the classic, “cannot be displayed” error. Others that have the application haven’t reported any issues and it’s nowhere to be found on any support forums, so I’m assuming it’s an isolated incident.

I was able to load the individual documents from the File:\ command that’s available. A minor inconvenience, but an inconvenience nontheless. If you want to import an address book or spreadsheet and have Microsoft Office, the conversions are quick and easy.

DVD Import

DVD Importing is also touted in Version 2, however only for non-encrypted DVD’s. So if you have a backup of a DVD that you already own, that can be read by the Media Manager and encoded directly to the PSP. These files can take a very long time to encode, which has always been a weak point of the Media Manager. It’s speed of AVC encoding is still nothing to write home about, but the next feature makes up for that quite a bit.

Offline Encoding

You can now have the Media Manager encode video without the PSP being connected. It will encode the video and place it into your designated PSP Sync folder. The next time you connect your PSP, the Media Manager will transfer those encoded videos directly to the PSP immediately. This is a huge time-saver, allowing you to encode numerous videos ahead of time and transfer them when you want them. I love this feature and it might be worth the $9 upgrade all by itself.

Other Notable Features

Other improvements allow for multiple-RSS Video or Audio feeds to be downloaded simultaneously. Additional options for converting Photo sizes (or not converting at all) are available as well and the option to not encode video (but the file sizes are much smaller in .MP4). Playlists are now recognized in the Media Manager, so you can transfer any music associated with a playlist you have saved on your system. Again, I can’t stress how much of an improvement the UI is this time around.

The Good

The Bad