I’m not sure what triggered this, but tonight I started jonesing to play with video on the DS. Did a little googling to find out what the best methods/programs were, and it seemed to me that Moonshell (which I already have on the R4) is the best bet. DPG is the format of choice: or should I say the only choice.
While they tout the fact that the file specification of DPG is open to the public, at the end of the day I don’t really care about that or the rest of the technical “blah blah blah blaaahhhhhhh” that seems to be the bulk of the information out there on using it. So here’s the very short list of what you need to get this bad boy up and running. (The .NET Framework 1.1 is also a prereq but I’m assuming you already have that, right?)
- AVISynth – Prerequisite to installing BatchDPG.
- BatchDPG – The encoding GUI I used for making the DPG’s.
Trial #1 was the latest episode of Family Guy which I grabbed online. The original AVI file was 178.8M, and the DPG file was a slender 49.2M. Then again the movie does get a bit neutered when encoding for the DS since programs like BatchDPG know that it doesn’t make sense to encode anything higher than a resolution that you can watch on one of the DS screens anyway (256×192 is max res), and I didn’t use the max audio bitrate either in my conversion. End result: I was pretty happy with the results. There seemed to be just a little bit of visual lag but I couldn’t tell if that was a result of frames being dropped (DPG movies are 24 FPS according to one source I read) or perhaps if the audio was ever so slightly out of sync. Whatever the issue was, my brain auto-adjusted pretty quick and it wasn’t more than 3 minutes in that I didn’t notice any issues at all.
Trial #2 was a full-length live-action film. I wanted to see how the encoding process went on a longer piece of video, plus I wanted to know if there were any sync issues here because I felt it would be much more noticeable with real actors (and potentially make the entire experience unpleasant). On a throw of the dart, I picked Casino Royale. 802M turned into 411M… not quite the 4:1 ratio I got off of Family Guy but still smaller. That said, the 2:1 ratio was totally worth it. Perhaps it had a lot to do with the source feed of the film (which was a DVDRip) compared to a recording off the television airwaves, but the image looked a lot cleaner and even the sound didn’t seem as muddled. Overall nice conversion, even if the letterboxing was so prominent on the film I picked that watching the full movie probably would have proved painful on this size screen.
I don’t see myself using this feature all the time, especially when this single full-length film takes up just over 20% of the capacity on my MicroSD card: I’d rather use that storage for games/homebrew/music. But if I have something like jury duty, or a flight, or any other point in time where I know I may have a good amount of time to kill and I’d rather just “veg” instead of playing a game? At least now I have the tools at hand ready to prepare some mobile entertainment. Since I don’t own a laptop or a portable DVD player, I’ll work with what I’ve got thanks.