Gameboy Advance SP GBA Movie Player Review

2004-05-25T16:48:00.000-07:00

Gameboy Advance SP GBA Movie Player Review

The GBA Movie Player

First the technical stuff:the GBA Movie Player is a slightly bulky little unit that plugs into a GBA or GBA SP cartridge slot. A regular game cartridge goes into a slot on the top, and a slot on the bottom accepts a standard Compact Flash card. I actually first tried running the thing without a game cartridge plugged into the secondary slot and it didn't load at all, it just froze at the GBA startup screen, just like it does when you try starting up the system without a cartridge installed. Once I put one in it worked just fine, but there must be some kind of hardware detection thing going on that's required in order to run the Movie Player. Regardless, the unit is light, and there’s a switch in the side to let you choose to play a game or movie. It sort of goes without saying, but it’s really not a good idea to hit that switch while the GBA is turned on. The switch is small, but it does stick out and there's no lock on it, so it is possible to hit the switch while it’s on. If you do, it’s basically like pulling a cartridge out of the system while it’s on. Just because I'm the sort who has to try this sort of thing I did it, and sure enough it crashed the GBA, but there was no permanent damage as far as I could tell (but it's still not a good idea.

The GBA Movie Player accepts three kinds of content: movies, music and e-books. Movies and music are converted using the included Windows software, while e-books are just TXT files dropped on to the card. It doesn't accept PDF or books in the Microsoft or Adobe reader formats, just plain ol’ TXT. Basically this means you can use anything that’s in the public domain, but you can forget about using e-books purchased on-line. Since books are displayed in a pretty straightforward font on the GBA screen I don’t know if I’d necessarily want to read anything of any substantial length with this, but I did read one of the old Shadow pulp stories while on the subway, and it wasn't half bad. As a nice plus, if you’re playing music, you can go back to the main screen and start reading a book without the music stopping. This is a pretty standard feature of any PDA, so it’s nice to see that here as well.

The main GBA player unit.
Before I get to the ins-and-outs of the conversion software, I should point out that the GBA Movie Player comes with just the unit itself. There’s no Compact Flash card, and there’s no USB cable to get data on to that card. I have a 128 MB CF card I use with my digital camera, and also have a nice USB flash media reader, but if you don’t have both of those you'll need to get them before you can actually do anything with this. The Movie Player is compatible with pretty much any Compact Flash card, including the larger-capacity Microdrives, so while I only have a 128 MB card, you could just as easily use 256 MB, 512 MB, 1 GB or higher cards.

The conversion software is a bit clunky, but it’s functional. You can set a wide range of quality options for both the audio and video of any converted movies, including a max file size setting, which will scale the movie you’re converting to fit on to whatever size card you have. The software says it will convert DiVX, AVI, Quicktime, MPEG and Real video formats, but I had some problems. I expect this was due to the fact that I was using my Mac to create these files, but I converted a DVD to DiVX using the freeware program forty-two, and the software couldn't read it. Oh well. You might have better luck using Windows shareware or downloaded DiVX files, since chances are that’s what the developers were using when they wrote it.

Futurama in action.
Fortunately, I had better luck converting content from my TiVo. I have a heavily modified Series 1 TiVo, which has a gargantuan hard drive, an Ethernet jack and some hardcore enhancements, including the ability to download television shows in their original Ty format to other machines on my network. For testing purposes, I used one episode each of Futurama and The Simpsons, as animation tends to work better than live action when compressed heavily (there's less movement, so there's less distortion). When they’re converted into standard MPEG2 files, these TiVo programs are quite large. Each of these shows, at only 30 minutes long, is actually around 800 MB. After running them through the GBA Movie Player’s compressor, each came to about 50 MB, which allowed me to put both on my single 128 MB Compact Flash card.

So how did they play? On the whole, quite well. I used different settings for each, and as such I had mixed results. With the Futurama episode, I did a straight 64:1 downsample on the audio. This resulted in audio that was pretty scratchy, and a little weak at times. So for the Simpsons episode, I did the same thing, but this time I increased the audio during the conversion, and it came out a bit better. It was still scratchy, but the increased volume went a long way. The video quality was quite good. It wasn't a full 24 frames per second, but I’d say it was around 10 – 15, which is quite capable, and certainly no slideshow. As expected, there were compression artifacts, but not nearly as many as I would have thought. It really only showed up when there was a lot of movement on screen. One of the other things I did was play with the different framing and cropping methods. With the Futurama episode, I had it set to display at full screen, which seemed to lower the framerate a bit. With the Simpsons episode I left it as is, which had an increased framerate, but gave the video a squished look.

Along with my review unit, I was provided with some sample movies, and I also converted a few other miscellaneous things for testing purposes, including the Metal Gear Solid episode of Mega64. As I expected, live action content does show more compression artifacts, but it was still quite capable. And because these source files were significantly smaller (10 MB as opposed to 800 MB) they required less compression to begin with. With the Mega64 file, I also used much less audio compression, and even left stereo sound enabled, which was something I had to turn off in order to keep the file sizes on my TiVo shows down. The result was a much higher quality experience.

The main menu.

The controls when watching video are pretty simple. The A button acts as your play/pause button, the B button takes you back to the video select screen, and the D-pad is used to fast-forward and rewind the video. You’re not given much control over fast forwarding. Pressing to the right or left jumps forward or backward to the next or previous minute mark, so if it’s at 2:15 and you hit the right button you'll go to 3:00, rather than 3:15. There’s no exact fast forwarding here, which shouldn't be much of a problem for most people, but since this was taken directly off my TiVo, that meant these shows included commercials. Since I couldn't get more specific when fast forwarding, I wound up watching the end of a commercial. That’s hardly a big deal, and if you’re watching content taken off a DVD obviously it won’t be an issue. If I really cared, I'd have deleted the commercials from the MPEG2 files before converting them. But that's a whole lot of trouble to go through just to avoid 20 seconds of commercials (because again, you can fast forward, just not precisely).

Controlling audio works exactly the same way as it does with video. You can only play/pause and skip forward or backward a single minute. As far as what you can actually do with the audio, there’s not much here. You can play songs that have been converted, but there’s no playlist support or anything like that. Since I own an iPod (not to mention about a dozen other devices that are capable of playing back digital audio) this can’t compete with that, so I only used it for video.

So how well does the GBA Movie Player work when used in the real world? I used it on my commute, and I can say that it does indeed work as advertised. The cartridge does add a bit of bulk, but it’s not too bad. I connected it to my GBA SP and carried it in the carrying case I have for my original model GBA, which it fit into with plenty of spare room. Once I was on the subway, I pulled the thing out and after going through the complex process of hooking up headphones to the SP, I fired up Futurama. It worked well. The small screen takes some getting used to, and the audio was a bit scratchy, but it did work, and my commute went by pretty quickly.

As far as battery usage is concerned, the SP does a great job there, and the Movie Player shouldn't use any more or less than any regular game.

How useful this device is to you really depends on whether or not you already own a Compact Flash card of at least 128 MB and a media reader to put content on it. If you've got a 512 MB or greater card, you can really go a long way with this, and I'm sure the quality of the video and audio is vastly improved over what I saw. If you've already got a nice sized CF card, reader, and GBA (preferably an SP), this little gizmo might be worth picking up. The player’s not the most full-featured, but it’s functional enough, and the price is certainly right for a device of this nature.

The Gameboy Advance Sp GBA Movie Player can be ordered on-line from www.a1goods.co.uk

Gameboy Advance movie & mp3 player adaptor

2004-05-25T16:23:00.000-07:00

The GBA Movie Player adaptor enables you to use your Gameboy Advance™ or Gameboy Advance SP™ to play video and audio files and read e-books from standard Compact Flash™ cards.

You can use your PC and your normal Compact Flash card reader to transfer and convert your media files to your Compact Flash cards.

The included software even converts files directly from DVD to the proper GBA format. The GBA Movie Player supports 'multi tasking', meaning that you can play songs while you are reading e-books in simple text format on your Gameboy Advance SP.

* Plays movies, music and e-books on your GBA or GBA SP

* Includes Windows™ software to convert or create content

* Compatible to standard Compact Flash™ cards (even the largest ones! - not included!)

* Firmware upgradeable through Compact Flash™ via free download

* This product is not licensed, endorsed or sponsored by Nintendo.

* Works with all Gameboy Advance™ systems sold worldwide

Price: £45.00 from www.a1goods.co.uk

Welcome to my Gameboy Advance SP Blog

2004-05-25T16:06:00.000-07:00

Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand, the Gameboy Advance SP is truly a small wonder!

The history of the Gameboy:

1989: Gameboy

1996: Gameboy Pocket

1998: Gameboy Pocket Light (Japan only)

1998: Gameboy Colour (or Gameboy Color as our none British readers would say!)

2001: Gameboy Advance

2002: Afterburner and Afterburner Case

2003: Gameboy Advance SP arrives!

This Blog will feature where to buy a Gameboy Advance SP and review accessories and adaptors for the Game Boy Advance (GBA) SP console.

We are happy to recommend www.a1goods.co.uk