New slot-1 media player in the works

[wraggster]

News via gbatemp

You may have seen our previous news piece that showed a Nintendo DSi playing various video formats directly (AVI,WMV,RMVB) without the initial need to transcode to a DS friendly format like DPG, today we are proud to announce that this will indeed be possible thanks to a new slot-1 cart that is currently being created by a new team.

Many of you speculated that this cart may be running in DSi homebrew mode which unfortunately is NOT the case. In fact, the new cart has a powerful on-board CPU that makes possible media playback that wouldn't normally be achievable on a Nintendo DS. (DSi mode being a different story)

Due to fears regarding Nintendo copyright infringement the cart is not being designed with game backup playing in mind, however it will still support DLDI homebrew. The cart is first and foremost a media player, and it will also support various audio formats as well as video.

While the hardware itself is completed, the carts software is still being wrapped up and is due to be completed early next week. GBAtemp have secured the first sample and will hopefully be receiving the finished product late next week, so stay tuned for more information and a full review.

[Sonny_Jim]

I didn't think there was enough bandwidth on the SPI bus to be adding on extra CPU's, especially for something as CPU intensive as playing video.

Personally, I don't see the point. The DS screen is only 256x192 pixels, why bother trying to show an AVI that has a greater resolution than that? And what's the odds on it only being able to play back a certain codec. I'll stick to converting on my PC, thanks.

EDIT: Actually, thinking about it, they've probably just stuck on a chip from a portable media player that can handle those formats, then chucked it down the SPI bus in a [email protected] format.
EDIT2: Apparently it's based on the Acekard2 with an extra FPGA

[JDvorak]

So this is another Game N' Music card with a custom cpu for playing more movie formats. I have found that if you ffmpeg all videos into the 256x192 resolution with the proper sound quality into an AVI with 11fps and then run it through the Game N' Music converter for movies that they play really well. Even on the lowest quality settings it plays and looks fine on the tiny screen. It converts most movies in about 15min or less. So I agree there may be no point in playing the original avi's on a device like this, but I'll probably get one to play around with!

Also has anyone gotten any avi's to play in TunaDS.? I can't get anything to play with it!