Xbox 360 vs. PS3. There’s no question that the real battle in the HD home theater space will be decided predominately by these two gaming platforms. With the PS3 launch just a week away, very few movies available in either format, and the sticker price of the stand-alone players in either format, it all boils down to this. Microsoft and Sony have known it for a few years now, which is why they’ve each bet the bank and called in “solids” from all their homies.

Personally I think HD-DVD and Xbox 360 have the advantage, even though their HD-DVD drive was just released. While many in the industry gripe about the fact that Microsoft didn’t embed the HD-DVD capability in their console, I think it was a wise move. The consoles were out on the market at an affordable price a year ahead of the competition, and the $200 price tag for an HD-DVD player is a steal compared to either formats stand-alone players.

If you have a PSP and aren’t using its video playback capabilities other than via UMD, you’re missing out on one of its best features. The PSP can basically serve as your personal wide-screen video player, which comes in quite handy for those who travel frequently. A 1GB Memory Stick Pro Duo card can hold several hours of good quality video and still have room for your music, pics, etc…

The only problem with this is that the PSP is very finicky with regard to MP4 files. It’ll balk on image sizes, frame rates, bit rates, file names, file locations, and just about anything else you can think of. And to top it all off, each firmware release for the PSP seems to handle things differently. But then again, I suppose if it were a simple standard process that remained consistent, Sony wouldn’t be able to market and sell software to manage this process for you (a.k.a. PSP Media Manager).