Since ipod took mp3 to the masses there's been constant talk of the fabled "ipod for movies" . What ipod did for CDs, the "ipod for movies" would do for DVDs - a gadget to give DVDs mobility. Fed up of your music collection on that long, boring train journey? Why not whip out your portable video player with a selection of movies. We're not talking about a cumbersome portable DVD player - they're old hat. And although recently tmubling in price, they all have one common downfall - you'll still be carting around all your DVDs. That's no better than a CD walkman for music.
There's a growing market for these so-called ipod for movies, but they're expensive and still very much first generation. They're also limited to playing media - at that price you'd think they'd offer the versatility of a PDA or the fun of a PSP. Both these gadgets will play video with ease, but what if I said there was an even cheaper way. What if you could use a £100 device to play portable video. Take a Gameboy Advance, add a GBA Movie Player and a dash of Flash Media and you've got yourself the world's cheapest portable video player. Better still, you probably have everything except the GBA Movie Player.
The GBA Movie Player contains a small instruction manual, a card to slot into your Gameboy Advance, and CD-ROM with movie conversion software.
The GBA Movie Player is about twice the size of a standard Gameboy Advance gamepack, with a slot for inserting your Compact Flash Card. I'm using a 1GB card for this review, which can be picked up for around £40. To play movies on your Gameboy Advance, simply slide your compact flash card into the GBA Movie Player, then insert the Movie Player into the Gameboy as you would with a standard Advance pak.
But before we take this step, we'll have to convert our movies to the correct format for Gameboy Advance playback. Start by installing the software on the CD-ROM shipped with the player - GBA Media. When installed, open up the Converter Wizard, which will take you through the steps to convert your video to the advance format.
Click Add on this screen to add media from your harddrive. If you're converting a DVD, you'll need to prepare your video before you can convert. For more information on converting DVDs for backup, take a look at our article featuring a range of DVD Backup Solutions. Browse to your video, then select next to be presented with a list of presets - here you've got the classic choice of quality versus quantity. You also have the choice of manual settings, but more on this later. After chosing the quality settings, it's on to "The Third Step" - deciding whether your video should be split into sections. This is a great feauture to make use of a few smaller CF cards you may have lying around. Simply set the file size to the size of the smallest card, then you can fill each one up with video.Clicking Next again takes you to the encoding screen. To start conversion, click the conversion button, sit back and wait. I'll be honest with you, the encoding process is slow - certainly less than real time; converting a 2min DV AVI file to the Gameboy Advance format took 6mins. After encoding, you'll get the option of previewing your video and then it's time to play the video back on your gameboy by copying the created files to the flash card.
Conversion
It's worth taking a deeper look at the conversion process. As hinted, the various quality options represent the quality/file size trade off we often see in video editing - the greater the quality, the bigger the file size and the less video we can fit on our Compact Flash card. As a guide, use the following table to see how much video you can squeeze onto the card:
That's over 8 movies al the lowest quality on one 1GB card. The unfortunate aspect about low quality mode is that the image resolution is severly reduced to allow for the reduced quality - but the software doesn't stretch the video back on playback. This resuls in the video being about the size of a 50p piece!
To really get the most out of the Movie Player, opt for manual settings. It makes sense to take advantage of the widescreen of the GBA - to achieve a widescreen presentation from an anamorphic source, select full screen with the width as 240 and the height as 136 in the manual settings. Make sure you leave the GBA default settings for brightness etc as they are - changing these will result in nasty looking video.
Playback
To playback on a Gameboy Advance, simply transfer the created files to your Flash Card (bothr the .gbs and the .gbm file for each movie). The Flashcard is inserted into the GBA Movie player, which is then slotted into the Advance just like a standard game pak. Once inserted, switching on your Gameboy will take you to main screen (if you haven't inserted a falshcard, you won't be able to view this screen). Simply chose play movie and you'll be presented with a list of all the movies you've transferred to the card. You'll also see here that you can convert and play music and ebooks as well as video!
I was impressed by the GBA Movie Player. For as little as £30, you'll be watching video on your Gameboy. With Movie Pak cartridges currently retailing around £20 per film this is bargain. Don't expect perfect results, but it's a fantastic new use for your Gameboy!
