Modding the PSP for MD playback

[b8a]

Just trying to find out: Does anyone know of any technical reasons why the PSP couldn't read a MD if you could insert one?

The PSP already plays ATRAC naitively, so my guess is that actual MD playback wouldn't be too hard to achieve, but the UMD loading door, while deffinately big enough to hold MDs, was clearly built to exclude their insertion. Comparing UMD's and MD's side-by-side, it looks like the disk circumfrence is pretty similar, so is there any technical reason why the PSP would not be able to read an MD if you could load one?

For a while I was thinking I was just an oddity in hoping for MD playback on the PSP, but I was talking to a DJ friend and realized that a lot of DJs have stacks of MD's just like myself and would probably appreciate being able to use them on the already DJ friendly PSP. Personally, I just have more MD's than MP3's and find myself carrying around my MD player more than my PSP. Since the PSP is capable of so much more, it would be nice to reverse that trend, as well as avoid the need to carry both.

I know there are a lot of specialty accessory advertisers on this site, so I'm posting this in the hopes that one might see this and give some feedback. If the PSP is technically capable of reading MDs and someone could supply MD mod kits for the PSP, I'd be very grateful.


Please, no comments about MDs suck, who would want one, yadda, yadda, yadda... Though in no way the majority, lots of people have MD's and a lot of those MD's have unique content that wouldn't be properly served being converted to other formats. Please don't post unless you have some legitimate interest in the topic. Thanks.

[yaustar]

Stick a DVD in a CD-ROM drive and tell me why it wont run even though it is exactly the same size.

[Skateblind]

I think the technology behind discs are the lasers that write and read them. Different discs(CD,DVD,+RW, etc.) require different wave lengths to be read or written. I'm not sure, but I think most laser products only have one wave length and so can read only one type of disc.

Please correct me if im wrong, I'd be interested in knowing how it actually works.

[zeromission80]

Let me clear some things up, SONY COULD CARE LESS, about backwards compatibility its called MONEY you know green stuff. They have not figured out how to market anything accept their first incarnation the psone nuff said....... DREAM ON..... Oh and mds are the most annoying pieces of media, buy an ipod you idiot!!!!!!!

[b8a]

Wow, surprised there was any interest in this topic,

Yaustar: Yes, I understand that, but you're talking about using a newer technology in an older player that would be more analagous to trying to play a UMD in a MD player. Of course that's not going to work because the MD player would have no idea how to deal with any of the UMD information. However, using your example of CD's and DVD's, most DVD players CAN read CD's (they are backwards compatible), and that is what I'm trying to find out about here. If the UMD drive is backwards compatible with MD's. I'm clearly admitting that I don't know all the specs, but to my knowledge, MD's are little more than containers for ATRAC3 data and since PSP already has the software to read ATRAC3, it just makes sense that, barring any obstructive physical differences, that the PSP would be able to read the MD data. Also, one of the reasons why CD players can't handle DVD's (other than the obvious lack of the required decoding software) is that the tracks on the DVD's are spaced closer togeather and CD players aren't capable of reading with that required extra precision. I wouldn't think that this would be a problem with the PSP in reading MD's since MD is a much older format and almost certainly wouldn't require reading precision that the PSP wouldn't be able to provide.

The type of information I'm looking for is actually more along the lines of what Skateblind mentioned. IE, if the PSP would absolutely NOT be able to read off of an MD, why is that? There's a lot of technical mumbo jumbo behind reading/writing disks that I obivously have no clue about and it did occur to me that there might be SOME physical difference between the MD recorded media and the UMD recorded media that would make it impossible for the PSP to read the tracks, but my hunch is that, if an MD COULD be inserted, the only thing stopping it from being read would probably be some sort of disk check code. But I obviously have no clue.

zeromission80: Don't call people idiots if you're too stupid to even read the post or comprehend what's written in it. I KNOW THAT SONY DOESN'T CARE ABOUT BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY. That's why this post is titled <b>MODDING</B> the PSP for MD playback. It's obviously not a feature that Sony's going to give to us. Futhermore, you've obviously never even used an MD because they're great (if slightly expensive) media. Extremely high quality, rerecordable thousands of times, oh, and did I mention? They were available at least five years before the iPod or recordable CD's became affordable/popular, and at the time were the most preferable solution for personal digital recording as well as listening to virtually skip-free music. This is not about what the most efficient process is for listening to digital music going forward, it's about maintaining backwards compatibility with media I already own and would be overly tedious to try and convert. Get a life, learn to pay attention, and stay out of threads you have no interest/constructive contribution for.

[b8a]

For any one actually interested in this topic, I did a little checking around and found the wavelengths for different optical disc standards:

<table border="0" cellspacing="0" style="width: 95%; margin: auto; margin-top: 0px; border: thin black solid"><tr style="border: thin black solid"><td style="background-color: #bbbbbb; padding: 5px; width: 10%">MD</td><td style="background-color: #aaaaff; text-align: center; padding: 5px">780nm</td></tr><tr><td style="padding: 5px; width: 10%">UMD</td><td style="background-color: #dddddd; text-align: center; padding: 5px">660nm</td></tr><tr style="border: thin black solid; width: 100%"><td style="background-color: #bbbbbb; padding: 5px; width: 10%">CD</td><td style="background-color: #aaaaff; text-align: center; padding: 5px">780nm</td></tr><tr><td style="padding: 5px; width: 10%">DVD</td><td style="background-color: #dddddd; text-align: center; padding: 5px">650nm</td></tr>
</table>

Additionally, I found <a href="http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press_Archive/200405/04-026E/" target="_blank">this link</a> illustrating how a special laser head had to be made in order to allow the new Blu-ray Disc players to have backwards compatibility with both CD and DVD formats, which goes a long way to explaining what it takes for multi-standard reading for me.

Since the UMD wavelength is 660nm, I guess it does look highly unlikely that an unmodified PSP would be able to read MD content, but given the similarity between CD/MD and UMD/DVD wavelengths, I wonder if a PSP wouldn't be able to be fitted with a reading mechanism from a DVD/CD combo player to enable it to read MD/UMD data. Given that the illustration in the link I provided above gives different wavelengths than what I was able to find in seperate documentation, there's clearly some leeway as far as that's concerned. There's doubtlessly a mess of other factors that would make this an unfeasible sollution, but it's a step closer to answering my question.

[IndianCheese]

Sounds like a good idea, and it had crossed my mind at one point also...until i realized that they were not gonna fit...

[DraconumPB]

Let me clear some things up, SONY COULD CARE LESS, about backwards compatibility its called MONEY you know green stuff. They have not figured out how to market anything accept their first incarnation the psone nuff said....... DREAM ON..... Oh and mds are the most annoying pieces of media, buy an ipod you idiot!!!!!!!

zeromission, I don't really think it's necessary to call b8a an 'idiot'... he's given plenty of valid reasons for wanting to have MD support and doesn't seem to call on Sony to give it to him.

essentially, if you already /have/ lots of MDs, you may want the support for it, no? an iPod is a valid alternative but there are drawbacks; namely that it's not cheap and is actually pretty fragile (for the value of it, anyway). MDs are smaller, lighter, and losing one isn't a big deal because it's not worth a lot compared to an iPod. But of course, as with anything, each has pros and cons; and in any event, the point is, b8a has a preference for using MDs and simply is asking the community if they have any information about the possibility that the PSP could be modded for it.

Finally, b8a kindly asks for replies that are on-topic and relevant.


Please, no comments about MDs suck, who would want one, yadda, yadda, yadda... Though in no way the majority, lots of people have MD's and a lot of those MD's have unique content that wouldn't be properly served being converted to other formats. Please don't post unless you have some legitimate interest in the topic. Thanks.

I suppose if you had read his post fully or, if you did that, respected your fellow forum member intent and wishes to any degree, you would not have wasted your time on a post that gives him no helpful information whatsoever or, really, provides him any value at all.

PS: Sony does /sometimes/ care about backwards-compatability - PS2 emulated the PS1. They have already made the precedent. Whether or not Sony will continue to do so with the PS3 or anything else is to be seen (or perhaps not - I don't know anything about the PS3) but you can't count Sony out on that, necessarily. Perhaps in this instance, anyway, but I don't think that Sony's motivation with _not_ providing MD compatability with the PSP was necessarily money, nor was it due to an overall policy of not being backwards-compatible. It could just have been seen as unecessary overall, and I'm sure plenty of other features could have been in the PSP but were seen the same way.

[drEDN4wt]

How about you dismantle your psp and md player and see if the drives have the same connector?

[b8a]

How about you dismantle your psp and md player and see if the drives have the same connector?I kind of doubt the connectors are the same... Again, pure conjecture on my part, but even with different connections, I would bet there would be some way of bridging the two. I really started this thread in the hope of attracting people who had some solid knowledge about the particulars of the issues involved so that I could cut down on the guesswork in clearing this matter up. I don't really mind doing some first-hand sloothing, as a matter of fact, I'd love to, but I couldn't really afford my PSP when I got it and money is still tight now, so it would be a personal tragedy for me if I lost it due to some careless mistake while fiddling around with the innards (and, in case you haven't been able to tell from the above posts, I'm not exactly exceptionally mechanically inclined). I was actually even thinking about buying a bricked PSP off of ebay, but even those units have some pretty strong demand and are fetching $100+. Hopefully finances will be better by the end of the summer and I can look into getting a guinea pig PSP then.

In the meantime, though, my interest in the topic is ongoing, and if anybody's got helpful input, I'd love to hear it.

As a sidenote, I was originally thinking that getting a PSP to recognize a MD would be the easy part, and that after that was done, the hard part would be building a homebrew ATRAC player. Luckily someone's <a href="http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=22867" target="_blank">recently accomplished this</a>, so I think the whole issue now is getting a PSP to physically accomodate and read MDs.

[I xfire I]

there are several problems with this, mainly this has all been said

but i know a bit about pcs etc and lasers, when the psp was first being devoloped by sony they could have used the MDs to hold the data for the games they wanted to have on the console, but then think pcs can read mds and that would be way to easy for pirating and getting copys of content. anyway so sony have obviously thought about it and came up with the umd format, its based on the MDs obviously it also has the case like a umd does, its just that you might be able to mod a umd drive bay to hold a MD but it wont get read as the psp is only set up with the laser and the lasers position to read umds.

what im thinking is if there is a way to make a external usb MD reader and mod it to work with the psp's usb port and make some kind of app that can access the reader. just a thought

[b8a]

Yeah, I realize that this is a pretty novel topic in the first place, but the external drive possibility is as good as a dead-end for my purposes. It's too far on the novel side, bordering on ludicrious (!_!) I'm trying to minimize the ammount of objects I'd have to carry around, so even if the external drive idea went anywhere, I'd be better off carrying a dedicated MD player anyway.

[I xfire I]

yeh, but i guess we can keep on dreaming

[John Vattic]

I've thought about this since the psp first came out.
i have an extra damaged(controls only) MD player and am looking for a broken psp on ebay(umd door broken only). If the psp could fit both discs then based on your research. you would only need to remove the minidisc slider cover to get access for the laser to the disc. this would be very beneficial to those of us with large minidisc collections.
Then if the umd rippers could rip the minidisc data to the memstick. we minidisc users would be in business.
but this is all academic and not worth the tedious engineering required.
but i may try if i can get the unit cheap enough. or maybe a bricked psp to tinker with the doors and UMD/minidisc fitting. but then again what is the size of a minidisc. i'm fairly sure it's more than 1.8 gig.
then again i'm a noob too so my words may mean blah blah to most.

[b8a]

The placement mechanism would be a little more and a little less complicated than that. Since the mechanism to automatically open the MD's slide is built into the doors on many MD players, I wouldn't think there would be any need to work around that. What makes the issue more complicated is the fact that UMD cartiridges are smaller than MD cartridges, along with the fact that the holes (that are used to lock the media in place) on the back of both media don't line up. If I thought that any of these were prohibitive hurdles, I wouldn't be continuing this thread, but it would deffinately take a bit of work to manufacture an even semi-elegant mechanism capable of hosting either MDs or UMDs. Although, one thought that has occured to me is to mod the system so that it's set to hold MDs by default, and then use a specially fitted "caddy" that would hold UMD's in place. In any case, I've seen friends perform more miraculous modding feats. The real question I have as of right now, is whether or not there's any hope of reading data off of an MD once it's in place.

Yeah, MD players are going dirt cheap on eBay, so finding testing parts for MD's isn't a problem. I've even been able to find several semi-affordable PSP's as well, so whether this ever goes anywhere or not, I hope to have fun looking into it in the near future.

By the way John, I'm farily sure that the data capacity of a MD isn't even close to a gig, much less 1.8 gig. If I remember right, it's about half as much as a CD, or about 360MB. There are "mega" capacity MD players out there, but they are only able to achieve that much storage thanks to massive compression (not taking into account the newer hi-MD's)

[samidgley]

That would be a rather ace idea if it would ever work, I used to love my MD. So if you ever do have an success it'll be interesting

[John Vattic]

now that you mention it you're right the md's are smaller capacity due to a compression. unless the disc is solely atrac 3 it probably wouldn't read. also atrac 3 is the compression method the minidiscs use when putting music on an MD through usb. so this probably is impossible.
sorry for the hype.
I hate proprietary crap like this.

[sideshowbob]

ok.. i just drilled a hole in the disk from a UMD.. It didn't work... In the CD drive it said File System Unknown.. But it did say there was a disk inserted.. 0 bytes free, 0 bytes used total: 0 bytes.

In the DVD drive it said please insert disk into drive G: oh well... Theres LCS gone..