[skabio]

I just got my imported movie player advance and I thought I'd give a small review.

First of all let me say this was worth every penny. It was fairly cheap, $25 for the player and $25 for a 256MB CF card. With this cart you can play movies, audio, read ebooks, view pictures and play flash games. When you purchase the cart it comes with a CD for converting your audio, video and pictures into a form, which the card can play. Ok the features:

Movies - In order to play movies you have to convert your video files into a form that the player can play, which in this case is .gbm for video and .gbs for audio. The program that came with it is pretty self-explanatory just pick the file you want to convert and press convert. Depending on the size of the file this can take quite a long time, which is my first beef with the product. You can convert the following files, .ra .avi .mov .asf .vob .mpg .mpeg. Most files I've tried to convert worked with the exception of .mov. The main problem I've encountered with this conversion is that some files the audio and the video loose sync. The main file types I've had problems with is .ra but for the most part it works fine. With the converting program you can choose different quality files. This is very helpful especially if you have a small CF card. The quality is fairly good in my opinion for such a small screen.

Audio - In order to play audio you have to convert the files to .gbs using the converting program or rip them to .wav. The main problem with this is that the sound quality gets compressed again if going from an mp3 to .gbs. This means that the sound is not quite as good as the mp3 which is fairly evident if you listen to the audio with headphones. With the converting program you can choose different sound quality but I have yet to find one that is comparable to mp3. So you’re not going to really be able to use this to replace an mp3 player unless sound quality is not that important to you.

Pictures - In order to view pictures the files have to be converted to .bmp. The quality of the pictures depends on their source file but in general they looked quite nice. The best part of the picture feature is the fact that you can view them while listening to audio. If you put pictures in a folder you can simply change from picture to picture using the shoulder buttons and scroll through all your pictures.

Ebooks - The only form you can view books in is .txt file format. Although this may seem to limit what you can use I found it works quite well because you can convert most files to .txt such as word documents and pdf files simply by choosing to save them as .txt files. Because of the size of the screen you are limited to 10 lines of text at a time. This is ok though because you can skip from page to page simply using the a button. Also you can bookmark where you are at if you want to stop reading simply by pressing the start button. Just like the picture viewer you can read your eBooks while your listening to the audio, which is very nice.

Flash Games - This is one of the main reason I bought this device. You can use this to play most Nes games as well as a few of the smaller gameboy games and a few other flash games that I've found. Since this device uses the GBA hardware you are limited to games with a file size of 256k because it has to load the entire game into the RAM. With the nes games this isn’t much of a problem because the ones that are too big can be compressed using a program called nespack. The only downside to these games is that you cannot save your progress, as they haven’t figured out a way to write to the CF cards. This also isn’t that big a deal because a lot of the nes games don’t have the ability to save anyway. Since the GBA portion of the screen is a different resolution than regular nes games the size had to be shrunk. This can cause a problem in reading certain text on some games. Most games I tried this didn’t really affect the game play. To play games they all have to have the .gba extension. For the nes and gb games this means you must find a packaging program to create a .gba file containing the rom and the emulator.

Overall I think this is a great addition to my DS if only for the nes games alone. The main downfall I see of this device is that it does not play mp3's directly. This makes the sound quality suffer. In comparison to what I've read on the play yan this device has a lot more functionality and is fairly cheaper but lacks great audio quality.

If you have any questions about the media player please feel free to ask.