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Open-Content GBA Movie Player Reviewed 31

Posted by simoniker from the start-your-encoding-now dept.
wraggster writes "The helpful people over at EAGB have done a great review of a new third-party GBA SP Movie Player Adapter. According to the review: 'This adapter... uses Compact Flash Cards (CF)... [and] comes with its own encoder software which gives the user free reign to encode any movie or music he wants.' They note the 'steep learning curve', and a 'rudimentary' feature set, but conclude: 'nothing beats that wow! factor when you see your first movie playing on the GBA/SP'." This is an interesting alternative to the recently announced U.S. and already-released Japanese GBA movie players, both of which restrict the movie content you can put on your Game Boy in some way.
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Open-Content GBA Movie Player Reviewed More

Open-Content GBA Movie Player Reviewed

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  • Hahaha... That's Great. (Score:4, Funny)

    by still_sick ( 585332 ) on Saturday January 03, 2004 @07:08PM (#7869722)
    If you look, one of the sample movies he encoded as an example was the MTV clip of Modanna and Brittney kissing.

    Kinda shows what this is actually going to be used for in the real world.

  • Compatibility (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Klatoo55 ( 726789 )
    Is it possible that the popularity of the game boy in connection with CompactFlash connectivity could boost the CF cards ahead of their competitors?
    • CF already is ahead of its competitors in terms of cents per megabyte. This is largely because it's physically bigger, I guess. Too big for a lot of handhelds and smartphones, which tend to go for something smaller these days like SD/MMC.

      Who cares what format is "top" anyway? Provided the cards are still made by a large number of people and supported by lots of companies and hence are at a reasonable price (I'm talking to you, Sony Memory Stick!) a few million in sales one way or the other doesn't really
    • Yes. The 45 GBA movie players that will sell will definitly boost the CF format, no longer will it be confined merely to millions of digital cameras and PDAs.

  • Come on apple. We want iVideo! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Saturday January 03, 2004 @08:50PM (#7870184) Journal
    I got an mp3 hd player but watching videos as well would so good for those of us who use public transport (and live in countries were street robbery is still rare).

    This sounds like a nice device but ideally you want something that can just play any format. Including just copying dvd to it and play. (nothing illegal about that is there?).

    Oh and please don't say laptop. I mean something that fits inside your trouser pocket and can survice a little bit of rough handling.

    Steve Jobs get a move on.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • can we say 'battery life'? Come on, how long do you expect to be able to play this iMovie? I mean, 2 hours? that doesn't give you much room to play solitaire on the thing... Just charge it up, turn it on once to play the movie, nonstop, and during the credits(hopefully not earlier), the battery dies. O doubt the battery would be long enough for a full movie, let alone a longy like LoTR or Braveheart.

  • 10 FPS (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 03, 2004 @08:58PM (#7870226)
    One thing that wasn't pointed out in that otherwise excellent review is that the player maxes out at 10FPS, even at the higher quality settings.

    Or as they put it in Engrish on their site [movieadvance.com]:
    "Photo scan rate: 10fps, photo playing quality equals to a digital camera! Our digital photo enhancing technology ensures you fresh display in your GBA (SP) screen!"

    Very simple cartoons like South Park looks ok at 10FPS but Simpsons etc start to look a bit wonky. Action scenes are completely unwatchable. You can't descipher what's going on.

  • I can't wait to play this on Visual Boy Advance!

  • Why should we even care about those things?! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by IntergalacticWalrus ( 720648 ) on Sunday January 04, 2004 @12:47AM (#7871150)
    The GBA is definitely not powerful enough to run movies at a decent quality (even with an extra peripherical that does some of the decoding work, there are limits), and besides the resolution is way too small.
    • The GBA itself isn't, but if they offloaded all of the processing to hardware it'd be okay. They didn't, though, and that limits it to 10FPS. Really nothing worthwhile except for the "wow" factor.

      Odd, too, since I've seen a software based system that was a whole lot better on the GBA. A friend of mine dumped a copy of the Matrix trailer onto a flash cart and the quality WAS pretty good.
  • The neat trick they are doing is the reencoding that transforms the video format from something known, to whatever the adapter or GBA/SP can support in hardware. Mainly the lower resolution will make it shrink to 256 Mb for 60 minutes of video. A DVD quality movie takes up aproximately 2 Gb of disk storage per hour.

    Does anyone know what video decoder hardware sits in the adapter or GBA/SP?

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