Play-Yan

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 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.

Converting movies

I use the following command line to command line to convert directly from DVD. As I use MacOS X I tried FFmpegX but it comes with a version of ffmpeg 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

#! /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"

With some movies the audio is out of sync. I have not found out why yet.

Examples

I tried a few movies and videos and here is what comes out:

Movie	Picture Quality	Sound Quality	Comments	Picture
Eminem's Mosh	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.
The 5th Element	okay	okay	Watchable. I have more problems with the english language (somehow muted).
Trainspotting	okay	okay	Quite a few artefacts and the general darkness is bad. Watchable though.
となりのトトロ 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.
Princess Mononoke	good	good	Here, almost the same as for 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.
Princess Blade	okay	okay	A little dark even for the backlit DS screen but watchable nevertheless.