Viewing Flash on PSP: My weblog is read by lots of Flash developers, but this entry is written particularly for people trying to view WWW sites with Adobe Flash content on Sony PSP devices. The new v2.70 firmware upgrade includes an Adobe Flash Player specially tailored for this gaming console. But many of the sites on the World Wide Web use Flash files which were developed and tested for fullsized computers, and so not every website will play the same on both big box and little box. In the extended entry here I'm starting up a little FAQ for viewing Flash websites on the Sony PSP. I hope the content developers who regularly read this blog can help add to the tips, and with luck we'll be able to get a final FAQ in a better location for the PSP-owning public before too long. Let's go...!
It's great that Sony is now distributing an Adobe Flash Player in their firmware upgrade to their entire audience... developers will now have a predictable capability to test against for this device.
But most of the people using a PSP will likely go out to various sites on the World Wide Web, and see files that do not play as well as they do on the desktop computer. There are reasons for this, let's list some of them here:
That's the bad news -- visiting random websites may not render Flash content well. But on the good side we've now got a predictable rendering engine in universal deployment on the Sony PSP, so starting now we'll be able to develop content deliberately optimized for this new device.
(Compare what's already done in the mobile world, with the Adobe Flash Lite rendering engine... the key difference between Mobile Flash and PSP Flash is that the former has content optimized for mobile hardware, while the Sony PSP is trying to view WWW sites which were optimized for full-sized computers.)
FAQ (in the "Favorite Anticipated Questions" deacronymization, because it's hard for me to guess the most frequent questions today.... ;-)
(Q) I heard some other people made a Flash player, maybe that will work better? (A) Speaking personally, I'm seeing a lot more companies advertising "Flash support", but this usually means that they can import a SWF file and render some parts of it. Sometimes these claims are grandiose; rarely is there any technical info to back it up. In this case, Sony has deployed an actual Adobe Flash Player to their entire customer base, so the issue of alternative renderers is moot.
(Q) Will Adobe be improving the Flash Player on Sony PSP? (A) I don't know, but I sure hope so... one of the major goals right now is for Adobe to provide predictable media and interactivity capabilities across the range of the world's devices... to not interfere with each device's basic nature but to provide a media layer that designers and developers can rely upon to render their work. Adobe works with Sony in many areas, and I'd like to see further work continue myself. Haven't seen any public announcements yet, though.
(Q) What can I do if a favorite site won't play? (A) I'm not sure on this one yet... there is talk on PSP sites about ways to play content out of the browser, but I can't evaluate this conversation yet. I'd like to beef up this section of the FAQ; any tips?
(Q) The PSP has some games which play great, so why is this one Flash game so sucky? (A) You're right, the PSP is capable of very high performance. But the best games are designed and tested for that device, take advantage of its strengths, minimize its weaknesses. Most Flash content we see right now has been designed for a totally different class of machine, so some examples will likely look really bad on a different device. But now that we've got the Flash Player engine on the PSP we can test against this device during development... there's a lot of really creative Flash professionals out there, and now they've got the keys to the highway. Future's looking good.
Some general references (and my apologies in advance for not crediting these links!):
ExtremeTech's PSP Media Guide March 2005. Primer on memory sticks, handling digital photographs, MPEG-4, etc.
Geek.com explains how the CPU speed in the PSP is throttled down for better battery life.
Web Design for Sony PSP, Oct 05, focuses on getting WWW content to render better in this browser.
Sony PSP Web Design Primer, Jan 06, offers a readable introduction to the display capabilities of the device.
Developing Web Sites and Applications for Sony PSP has some technical details I haven't seen elsewhere.
PSPUpdates links to a technique for playing Flash files outside of the browser. I have not investigated this, and do not yet have any useful context of my own to offer.