Games/Nintendo DS/Play-Yan {image:img=play_yan.png|align=float-right} A movie and audio player for the [Games/Gameboy Advance] (SP) and [Games/Nintendo DS]. The picture quality is quite good but the downsampling of the sound to 8kHz does not do good. Maybe its the downsampling of ffmpeg that creates such bad quality. However, watching movies is okay if you use the integrated headphone jack. The sound of the built-in speakers of the [Games/Nintendo DS] is not tolerable. The quality of MP3 playback is excellent. But again, the use of headphones is recommended. A full-length movie takes about 350-400MB of space. On a 1GB SD-Card you can store two movies and a few MP3s. All in all, the whole design and usage is very japanese. Little stars spinning, a bird as menu guide and fishes and a car moving over the screen make it definitely more a gaming device than something that could compete with a [Games/PSP]. 1 Converting movies I use the following command line to command line to convert directly from DVD. As I use [MacOS X] I tried {link:FFmpegX|http://homepage.mac.com/major4/} but it comes with a version of {link:ffmpeg|http://ffmpeg.sf.net/} that seems to have a broken ASF converter. The movies are not even recognised on the play-yan. A self-built version (build 4751) works great though. ~~Save to playyan.sh and make executable with chmod +x playyan.sh~~ {code} #! /bin/sh ffmpeg -y -i "$1" -title "$2" -timestamp "" -bitexact -hq -me full -strict 3 -vcodec mpeg4 -vtag MP4S -s 240x176 -r 30 -b 480 -acodec g726 -ac 1 -ar 8000 -ab 32 -f asf $2".ASF" {code} With some movies the audio is out of sync. I have not found out why yet. 1 Examples I tried a few movies and videos and here is what comes out: {table} Movie | Picture Quality | Sound Quality | Comments | Picture {link:Eminem's Mosh|http://www.gnn.tv/videos/video.php?id=27} | okay | very bad | Looks like converting the bass and music in general to 8kHz generates a lot of noise. There are artefacts but in general the quality is quite okay. [Movies/Science Fiction/The 5th Element] | okay | okay | Watchable. I have more problems with the english language (somehow muted).| {image:The5thElement_small.png|link=space/Games/Nintendo DS/Play-yan/The5thElement.png} [Movies/Special/Trainspotting] | okay | okay | Quite a few artefacts and the general darkness is bad. Watchable though.| {image:trainspotting_small.png|link=space/Games/Nintendo DS/Play-yan/trainspotting.png} [Movies/Anime/となりのトトロ] \\[Movies/Anime/My Neighbor Totoro]| great | good | Animations are very good on the screen and since this movies has not many scenes with music the sound conversion is quite good. | {image:totoro_small.png|link=space/Games/Nintendo DS/Play-yan/totoro.png} [Movies/Anime/Princess Mononoke] | good | good | Here, almost the same as for [Movies/Anime/となりのトトロ] applies. However, there are more camera moves and more sound, so this makes it a wee bit less enjoyable.| {image:mononoke_small.png|link=space/Games/Nintendo DS/Play-yan/mononoke.png} [Movies/Special/Princess Blade] | okay | okay | A little dark even for the backlit DS screen but watchable nevertheless. | {image:princessblade_small.png|link=space/Games/Nintendo DS/Play-yan/princessblade.png} {table} 2005-04-06 17:41:25.262 2005-03-29 23:16:37.517 Mon Apr 04 16:19:12 CEST 2005 Wed Apr 06 17:38:27 CEST 2005 Mon Apr 04 16:18:53 CEST 2005 Wed Apr 06 17:38:00 CEST 2005 Tue Mar 29 23:17:10 CEST 2005 Tue Apr 05 22:46:24 CEST 2005 Wed Apr 06 17:29:46 CEST 2005 Wed Apr 06 17:30:04 CEST 2005 Wed Apr 06 17:30:16 CEST 2005 Mon Apr 04 16:19:03 CEST 2005 Wed Apr 06 17:38:14 CEST 2005