Yes, I remember coming across your post when researching about it! :P
That is why I got this!
I used to be a huge PSP fan, with a bunch of games for it, but no UMD movies.
So I was like, "I want to try to experience one UMD movie at least, as a last hurrah for the console, and what better than something that is Evangelion!"
I have non-Japanese PSPs, so I wanted to see if the movies would run.
If they didn't, then at least it's a neat collector's item.
Though, I was already kind of confident about getting the movie working since the PSP has been reverse-engineered to death from what I remember when I used to follow the news; one could do region free movie playback since way back in 2007 if I remember correctly.
You should have experimented! :)
Back then though, one had to flash the whole firmware to get it rooted. Nowadays, since they figured out the keys/encryption-passwords to the PSP and PS3, one can run the new firmware temporarily as an app that one needs to run only on restarts to trigger, or if you wish, install it permanently:
To get started on rooting if you're interested, see:
https://code.google.com/p/procfw/wiki/Installation
If you need help, Google, or message me.
* EDIT - turns out I got lucky; CFW's region-free is broken; instead it worked because my rooted European PSP turned out to be in the same movie region as Japan *
Anyways, here's it running the movie on my European PSP and the other picture is what happens when I run it on my American PSP:
Though I'm slightly disappointed. All it does is play the movie directly. There are no neat menus like one would expect a DVD or Bluray to have. Booooooooooooo.