Sony PSP Media Manager

Shoutout to Paul Thurrott for bringing the Sony PSP Media Manager to my attention. You can buy, that's right buy, the Sony PSP Media Manager here I can't believe Sony is charging $19.95 for the download, $29.95 for the boxed version with a special introductory offer of $24.95! This is terrible, Sony should be giving this away with the PSP, it should just be a free download. Completely evil. Paul also posted a link to the software release notes. Notice that it requires Quicktime 7 and it's a .NET application, both of which I find interesting. And that's right, the final strike against this software, before I have even seen it live, is that it doesn't work on OS X. That's it I guess, I have been waiting for the FREE Sony software for the PSP to do what iTunes does for the iPod, obvious now it's not coming. Scott Hanselman has a good post on manually getting TV content onto your PSP with Windows tools, and I just saw he updated his post with a link to the Media Manager software. After reading Hanselman's post, it seems Handbrake for Mac and Linux can do the video encoding work, you would just have to get the videos onto the PSP manually, which still of course sucks because of Sony's folder and file naming scheme. Maybe a weekend project to try, though video has to be small, I am not spending the money on the 1 GB memory stick until I can get a test done. I am still not paying for software to complete the scenario of getting media on the PSP, no wonder Sony has lost the MP3 player race to Apple, they just don't understand completing the user experience.