So, you have your brand new Sony PSP and if you’ve done the sensible thing, you bought a memory card to go with it – this way you can transfer plenty of movie and movies onto the device, especially movies as the widescreen aspect ratio of the PSP’s gloriously bright screen isn’t just for games.

Our quick take

If you’ve a PSP then you’ve probably thought that it would be good to have a convenient way to get stuff onto it. X-oom doesn’t offer anything you won’t find on a host of other programs but the fact that it’s specifically for the PSP means the first-time user can pick it up and know exactly what he’s getting, which can’t be bad.

X-OOM PSP Media Suite - PC - 3.5 / 5

FORAGAINST
  • cheap
  • easy to use
  • doesn’t copy encrypted files

X-oom has at one time or another offered all three parts of Media Suite – Movies, Music and Photoshow, as separate applications but now they’ve bundled them together.

It’s not only more cost-effective for the buyer, it also makes logical sense that if you want to copy and manage one format you’ll want the others too.

Perhaps Movies is the most sort-after tool but lets’ clear one thing up first: it won’t transfer any copy protected DVDs so you’re limited to stuff you’ve already got on your hard drive – unless you live in that shady part of the Internet that already knows the applications you need to crack DVDs but then you wouldn’t want this tool, would you?

You can create DivX, WMV, AVI, MPEG files from the files on your hard drive and converting them at 25% faster than real time, which is nice but can still take a long time.

Unlike the standalone version, you now get a USB cable to link from your computer to your PSP, so copying files is easier – it even acts as a recharger, which is neat.

One of the nice touches that works straight away is the X-OOM Fit-to-stick technology, which automatically compresses video files to fit standard memory cards sizes. So, specify what you have and it’ll rip to fit.

Music you would assume would manage your MP3s and copy them over to the PSP, right? Well, not really. In fact, it’s little more than a tool called Lame MP3, which allows you to capture internet radio streams.

Photoshow is perhaps the least appealing aspect of the three programs but is the one that delivers. As the name implies, you can create slideshows of your images and view them on your PSP. This may not be particularly exciting but it means you can store your holiday snaps as convenient individual files rather than as a group of separate photos.

So, is the package worth the money? Well, you can’t "legally" rip DVDs and the only music you can transfer is captured internet radio streams, so to a degree it offers the moon and delivers a hot potato of ifs and buts.

To recap

Bundling together three different tools is cost-effective and it’s a comprehensive set of tools that does exactly what it sets out to do