Game Boy Advance Movie Player Detailed

Thanks to IGN Pocket for their article on the forthcoming Japanese launch of AM3's Advance Movie player for the Game Boy Advance. According to the piece, the player will come standalone, or "...bundled with episode one of the cartoon [Detective Conan] for a total cost of 3800 yen [$33]", and some time after that, "...gamers will be able to purchase blank Smart Media cards for 1800 yen and begin downloading content from their PC, using a Smart Media writer to get the content onto the blank card", though "cost should run between 100 and 500 yen [$1-$5]" for each download. Finally, following some "impressive video sequences" seen at the Tokyo Game Show, it's confirmed that "this technology... is also being applied to actual [GBA] games, with Square Enix's Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories being the first example."

Re:First post!

[Babbster]

Since they're looking to sell the content, the only way episodes of Family Guy (for example) would become available is if a deal is made with Fox or if the compression method (encryption?) was made public or hacked. This model also makes it that much more unlikely that the product will be marketed outside Japan since they would have to set up the service again and obtain permissions for content that would appeal to other markets.

In short, outside of Japan this will likely only appeal to the import/hackin

What format?

[Bagels]

What format is the video going to be in? I've actually seen a demo of the GBA playing a movie using DivX before, but it was really far too slow to be practical, so I doubt that's it. Maybe it might be possible with a hardware decoder built into the movie player, but it's hard to believe that that would fit into the tiny space in a GBA cartridge.

Movies on the Gameboy a good thing?

[Ian_Bailey]

As if gameboy games need long cut-scenes in the middle of them! Just imagine, no interaction and you can't skip them so you can get to the actual playing...

4X Technologies

[waka0831]

RE: The compression technology being used in actual GBA games...

There are actually GBA games out there already using this compression codec. AM3 purchased the compression technology from a failed French company named 4X Technologies.

The compression is fairly good, but don't expect long cutscenes in GBA games from now on. Depending on your compression settings, a minute of video with sound still costs about a megabyte, which is 1/8th of a standard game cart size.

There are several other competing GBA cod

Quality?

[aliens]

I find it hard to believe that GBA's 12MHz ARM7 CPU can handle decoding well enough when a GP32 clocked at 166Mhz with an ARM9, while able to do video can't really give clear DiVX 4 video at 24fps or greater.

Maybe the software is really that good?

Re:Quality?

[aminorex]

The cart will contain a media co-processor.

Re:Quality?

[aliens]

From the article:

Apparently, the adapter cartridge doesn't have a decoding chip of any form. Using a technology called ACTIMAGINE, the Game Boy Advance's ARM7 CPU is able to handle all the decoding on its own, :-0

Amazing, I gotta see just how good this video is for myself.

Re:Quality?

[js7a]

Intel put a load of MPEG decoder support in ARM hardware in hopes of someone doing this since Xscale.

Re:Quality?

[waka0831]

Remember that the GBA screen is only 240x160. There are games on the market already using full motion video. Check out the new Lion King game [ign.com].