HOW-TO: Get RSS feeds on your PSP

This how-to serves a few functions: to piggy-back off the excellent work already done by roto to sniff out and untether the browser feature inside the PlayStation Portable's Wipeout Pure game, to serve as a step-by-step graphical walk-through for PSP owners who are unfamiliar with dabbling in the ways of DNS settings, and to provide another portal DNS server option for PSP users who don't have need or desire to set up their own DNS. Our portal includes a handy link to the Bloglines web-based RSS reader service, to add in some RSS reading functionality to the PSP.

What you'll need for this how-to:

• Sony PlayStation Portable
• Wipeout Pure PSP game
• A free Bloglines account. We won't go over setting up this account — just head over to Bloglines if you don't have an account already; it's self-explanatory.

Let's go!

Fire up your PSP and head on down to Settings, all the way to the left in the main menu. Go all the way down and select Network settings area:

Select Infrastructure mode:

Choose "New Connection" to, um, set up a new connection:

Give a name to your connection. You can store up to 10 different network connections on the PSP, so as other portals spring up and/or if you set up your own, you can store them all and point to whichever one you fancy, plus keep your regular network settings stored. If one portal is down, you can head on over to another (share the bandwidth, share the love). We'll call ours, cryptically, "Engadget portal":

Hit Enter to save the name for this connection, then press the right arrow button to continue. You'll be prompted for your local network's SSID. If you know the name of your network you can enter it, but in most cases you can just have the PSP scan for available networks and select the correct SSID. We'll scan:

We have two wireless networks in our vicinity, and the PSP finds them both. Being of sound mind, we choose the one with the strongest signal strength, hit X to select it, then the right arrow button to continue.

Here's where we'll make the all-important DNS setting change that unchains the poor Wipeout Pure browser from endlessly phoning home to ingame.scea.com. In the Address Settings window, choose Custom.

First you'll see the "IP Address Setting" pane — this can remain set on the default choice: Automatic. Hit the right arrow button to move to the "DNS Setting" pane. Here you'll select Manual:

Hit X to select and modify the Primary DNS server address. The address of our portal server is 208.42.28.174 — make your changes in each of the four IP segments by using the up and down arrow keys to scroll through the list of numbers. You can leave Secondary DNS as is. Hit X to save the settings when you're done. Big thanks to Hackaday editor Jason Striegel for setting up the DNS proxy!

Hit the right arrow key again and you'll see the "Proxy Server" settings pane, which can stay set on the default choice, "Do Not Use." Hit the right arrow to continue. You'll see a summary of the settings you chose under the "Setting List" header. Press the right arrow button again, then press X to save these settings. When the save is completed, you'll have the option to test the connection. Go ahead and give yourself some piece of mind and do this.

Following a successful connection test, the Network Settings pane will spit back your settings. The PSP has automagically detected the settings you didn't fill in from your wireless router, which doles out IP address via DHCP like Hare Krishnas hand out pamphlets at airports, except much more useful. You'll see the "Succeeded" flag next to "Internet Connection" and ye shall do the dance of joy. Still dancing? We'll wait.

Finished there, hotfoot? Hit the O key to back out of the Network Settings menu subtree and back out into the main plaza of the main menu. Throw in the Wipeout Pure game, stored on that bastion of standards — the UMD disc. Fire it up.

From the main menu, scroll down to the Download option and select it. Once you do, you'll be prompted to select which of your saved network connections you want to use to connect. Select whatever you've named our portal and hit X:

You should see something approximating the view below (sans the Gmail link, which we tried to get going but the browser definitely balked at trying to enter a secure site). Ultimately, as other folks experimenting with this have mentioned, we found the browser to be a bit wonky. Sometimes connections were solid and relatively fast, whereas other times we could have written a short novella in the time it took to load even a simple page (luckily we had the good sense to spare the world from our literary onslaught). One persistent error consistently cropped up, which was that all elements of the page would seem to load except the background color, which would remain black, black, none more black, making plain text impossible to read. We don't know why. Has anyone else seen this? Still, links left unstyled show up despite this wonky rendering, so the portal should remain usable regardless. The text box at the bottom of the page will take a standard URL as input so you can go anywhere from here. Below this (off the screen) is a textbox that will perform a Google search on whatever text you enter there.

Hie on down to the Bloglines link by using the down key to traverse the links (you'll see them highlight as you walk through them). Select it with the X key.

Hit the down arrow again to bring focus to the "Email:" login text box. When you hit X, the PSP keyboard entry API will open, allowing you to enter data into the text box. Enter your bloglines email login, then hit Enter. Hit the down key to select the password textbox; enter your password using the keyboard entry again and hit Enter. Arrow down to the Log In button and hit X to activate the button.

This will log you into the Bloglines mobile site, which is specially formatted for portable devices. It suits the PSP screen rather well. You'll see your list of feeds displayed; just use the up and down arrow keys to scroll through the list, and the X key to select whicever feed you'd like to view.

The feed you selected should load in the PSP browser; pretty simple! Just use the arrow keys to scroll up and down and read your feed. At the top of the page is a handy set of navigation links; use the "Subscriptions" link to hike back out to your main list of feeds.

To get back out to the portal home to access other links and/or use the URL bar to input any destination of your choice, just hit the  "Start" button on the PSP. You'll get a prompt to Continue, Goto Home Page, or Quit. Quit will exit the Wipeout Pure game (funny that we're still technically inside a game, no?), and Goto Home Page will take you back to the Engadget portal. Should our portal ever be bandwidth throttled, you can set up other portals as network connections for redundancy when you need it.

Given the wonkiness of this method, we're not recommending anyone run their small business off their PSP browser connection or anything. Your mileage may vary — but it does expand the possibilities of the device, and can be useful as an extra portable newsreader or Flickr client. In a perfect world we wouldn't have to jump through these hoops just to squeeze out a bit of functionality that's already present but locked down in the device, but we don't have to tell you that, do we?

Update

: There's a way to vastly improve the performance of the PSP browser over what we saw above, which is simply to turn off the WLAN Power Save setting that ships On by default. Go to Settings > Power Save Settings and switch the WLAN Power Save to Off. You'll ideally want to have your PSP plugged in the AC power for surfing sessions because this will eat the battery up much faster without the Power Save On, but we're actually browsing relatively speedily now!

We added a link to del.icio.us/popular in the portal because the del.icio.us site works great on the PSP. If anyone wants to post up in the comments if they find sites that work particularly well in the PSP browser (well-formatted, e.g.), we'll collate them into a separate del.icio.us account and post that to the portal, as well. Also, leaving comments on Flickr photos is a snap. Wheeee!

[jim @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

WOW. This actually worked the 1st time for me. Very cool

[Brian @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

I'll come back in 15 minutes when all the images have loaded.

[shadekh @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

nice, but it sucks that we have to go to such lengths to get the net on the psp, or for that matter, movies. Does not exactly match up to the stated claims of an all in 1 media center. and why not provide a rudimentary web browser if the functionality exists, and a better input system?

Sony makes great hardware, yet the software/firmware spoils it all.

[suproach @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

Comercial WBPSP LAunch imenent!!
OY GLAVEN!
SOmone must port mozzila to whatever format this thing will take.

[jim @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

this is cool, worked right away for me.

[roberto @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

well i think this is a temporary hack until sony puts out there own. although i agree sony will try to squeeze every penny out of you. that's why i haven't bought a psp. not until they go down in price and you see cheaper accesories and other goodies,and people really start to hack the thing to run what we want with it. btw things like this give me a warm fuzzy feeling about engadget.

[StevenL @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

I can't wait until hackers get their hands on a Sony PSP Dev Kit... writing your own apps to read text to display the text instead of displaying it in a bloated jpg file.

Then again it's only been less than a week since the release. 6 months from now I'm sure we'll see a lot of apps for it.

[Brent @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

Has anyone tried any other feeds like Dilbert (http://dwlt.net/tapestry/dilbert.rdf) or Gametrailers.com (http://www.gametrailers.com/rss/newest.xml)?

[jim @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

I've been going to alot of pda relates sites, mainly from links from engadget. Like palmone, pda247, I can't believe this thing is doing this already and hasn't been out for more than a week.

[Mike @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

i got this to work on my friends wireless network (it was awesome) but when i got home it didnt work on my wireless network. can someone please help? it goes to the coming soon screen for wipe out please email [e-mail]

[TheZodiac @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

So.. whos going to start PSP'Casting? PlayCasting?...

Sounds logical to me :)

[burchie @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

I was going to get ridge racer for my psp, now i am going to get wipeout pure for sure(my mom won't let me use her computer very often).

Absurd genious also has a pretty good portal of sorts set up...thanks engadget.

[mike @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

can you play any online games with the psp and can it stream any video or audio? ive tried a few sites but haven't goten any luck, i just have that annoying wipeout pure music in the background the hole time im browsing.

[Jesse @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

Nice freaking setup man. I am from http://www.pspforums.com and I am gonna post to this article.

Very kick arse. I will have a pspforums.com feed for articles in the next couple days. Hopefully someone can post a picture of their PSP with our feed.

:-)

[fred @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

Why do I get "A connection error has occured the WLAN switch is not turned on"

I ahve a cable internet using a netgear WGT624 router.
Can someone please help?
Thanks

[Prasant Atluri @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

Didn't work. When I do the "Scan" step, it gives me an error message. It says that "The WLAN switch is not turned on."

[Ben Garmisa @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

Prasant...

You might want to switch the WLAN switch to "on" then ;)

...

[StarLog @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

This is whacky, gotta love this PSP. Yes, the audio in the background is anoying, just turn it down.

[tonicboy @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

Fantastic! I can get all the links to work, but the address box or the Google box don't work for me - I can type in stuff but the Go link doesn't do anything. Has anyone gotten them to work?

[JCubed @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

Same with me, all the links work great. but neither of the imput boxes will let me enter in characters, but when I press x while the "go" button is highlighted nothing happens.

[JCubed @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

errr. or rather the input boxes work but neither will take me anywhere

[fred @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

How do I turn on the WLAN? my router is already on..is there anything else I should do?

Is there a link on step by step how to guide ?

[lgc90 @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

Pretty cool - I got the setup to work, but I dont have wipeout pure. O well, I guess I'll have to wait for sony to introduce their browser.

[Smabbage @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

I followed the steps to the letter with one exception. To access the internet with my PSP or my laptop for that matter, I have to use a Proxy server on my Desktop since all I have in my area is dialup. So in essence, I logon to the internet with the desktop, crank up the proxy server, crank up my laptop/psp and then using my wireless router, connect to my desktop and out to the internet. That said I've programmed my PSP exactly as described above except, I also program in my proxy server. Unfortuately, when I do this, the PSP connects to the internet and goes to the Wipeout page instead of the EGadget portal. So my question is, does the proxy setting negate the DNS setting? Can anyone put forth some practical suggestions? Before you say "Get DSL or Cable!", I can't, it's not available where I live. Thanks for any help you can afford.

[Memocobra @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

It works! Sweet

[Dan Rubin @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

The background color issue is simply due to the browser's lack of support for hex color shorthand. You have the bgcolor set to "#fff" instead of "#ffffff" or "white" which will both work.

For those interested bleeding edgers, work is in progress on something a little more thorough in the PSP portal department. We'll have something available soon as a live alpha version. Stay tuned...

[Tim Nicholson @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

My PdaMobileWeb.com portal would be perfect for the PSP. Its a comprehensive index of PDA/Phone-friendly links to news, sports scores, stock quotes, weather, entertainment, etc.

http://www.pdamobileweb.com

Now I'm going to have to go out and buy Wipeout Pure just so can try this. I wish Sony would go ahead and release the web browser as a downloadable update. Hopefully at least by the May 2 Korean launch.

[Dan Rubin @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

One more thing: in my tests so far, it appears that this requirement only applies to colors set in HTML (as opposed to using the very minimal CSS support in this browser).

For example, bgcolor="#fff" on the body tag won't work, but background-color:#fff; in your stylesheet (or inline) will.

[mark @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

wow this is so kl! interent on the psp i never heard fo that! just one question tho do i need wipeout pure? i got ridge racer would that work?

[mark @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

wow this is so kl! interent on the psp i never heard fo that! just one question tho do i need wipeout pure? i got ridge racer would that work?

[tj @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

the java web address field lets me input the address but when I hit Go!, nothing happens. Is anyone's working?

[sam @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

i don't know what my ssid is can you help plz and also i keep getting a (access not detected) plz help i got everything buit this task

[Michael @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

I keep gettin connection error 80110482 anyone please help? my aim is miken44444, email [e-mail], willing to pay $5 paypal to any help

[Andrew @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

Can someone help me I just bought PSP and I have a wireless router. when i try to connect it gives me an error message. when i go into my router page, i have a pre-shared key. where this is, there is also option for WEP but i tried it and it doesnt work. I have a Linksys WRT54GS Router. Any help will be appreciated greatly. Thanks

[pspspsp @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

Is it just me or is this spotty at best. I have managed to connect to the engadget portal once in three days and attempted a gazillion times. Once I got in, I got through to bloglines, but then it stopped responding. I have had similar problems with other portals. Can anyone recommend some active ones that I can test tonight or have I messed up my PSP?

[michael @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

i did all of what it said...but for some reason it just goes to the wipEout purE "downloads coming soon _hold on !" screen. and just sits there. why is it doing this?

[Brett @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

Make sure you have a good DNS address. I suggest using 67.171.70.72 It has a link to Google.com and you can also type in any URL and go to that page.

[michael @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

i know...i have tried that address, and a couple of other ones. the wierd thing is that it keeps going to the coming soon page.

[Scott Canoni @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

The input field doesn't work.

[Rob @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

I followed the above exactly but and succesfully connected etc, butwhen I'm at the 'new connection' stage on after loading wipeout I get a screen telling me 'Wipeout pure - downloading coming soon - hold on!'. I have a USA PSP and USA copy of Wipeout Pure. Have I done something wrong, or is this only for Jap copies of Wipeout Pure?

[jdr @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

very cool!

[lee @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

I am getting the downloading coming soon page as well. Anyone got any ideas? Linksys home wireless router... Tried several DNS servers. No luck. Thanks.

[munchgrunch @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

hello everyone,

i too am having problems accessing the internet. all i get is the coming soon page and i followed the instructions exactly.

i am using a D-Link AirPlus Xtreme G DWL-G520 Adapter. can anyone help me in my situation?

if so please email me: [e-mail]

thanks

[BiG sHoT @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

hi there

I got everything working with the settings but when I Test the connection I keep getting a connection error (80410d07) I keep trying and it doesn't work. Could someone please help me with this i'd apppreciate it Thanks.

[albert @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

im trying to get my psp to connect to a wirless router wrt54gs. i pot everything on atuomaticand filled everything out but when i try to connect it says connection error 80110482. HELP!!!

[chad @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

Besides the 2 dns servers mentioned here has anyone set up a dns server ?
Stuck at "Downloads coming soon Hold On !"

[Tim @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

What is the url for bloglines mobile edition?

I'd like to have access via my Blackberry like I do with the PSP.

Has anyone been successful accessing their yahoo mail or gmail accounts via the PSP browser? For some reason, I can go to many sites but those.

Does the PSP identify itself to servers as a mobile device thus getting pages optimized for the device?

The PSP offers a fantastic web browsing experience - especially for RSS feeds. Better than any other handheld out there.

[mark @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

bloglines mobile edition is at http://www.bloglines.com/mobile/

[cantgetit towork @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

I've tried both DNS id's, but I still don't get the browser to work. I get a connection through my WEP wireless router. I just bought the WipeOut Pure two days ago. Can someone help or send me new dns settings?

[Aaron @ Dec 19th 2005 1:22AM]

yea i get the download coming soon page as well

is our settings wrong or is it cause our wireless router/hub is crap