I thought I’d kick off a new thread to try and collect all the suggestions people have had for the player code.

• Turn bottom screen off/on when required, to save power
• Display current video time when playback is paused
• Look at fitting more lines into the file browser (increased from 3)
• Look at implementing a resume feature (requires writing to flash)
• Look at implementing a ‘soft reboot’ function

UPDATES FROM THREAD

• Subtitling support in encoder. Issues about what font to use…
• Possible downmix of stereo to mono

Carry on with any ideas you’ve had that aren’t covered above.

Again, I’d like to see mp3 support. But as you said in another thread, the difficulty is overcoming the issue of separating the decoding from the rest of the code.

im not sure about soft reboot function because i know that was always a problem with homebrew in the past and developers…. its because the structure of all the media out there is different so it calls for special attention, we’re lucky some homebrewers got together and created DLDI, i doubt you would want to trouble yourself with soft reset….
maybe im wrong… but i think it would be an issue.

That’s interesting, because we’re specifically looking that that functionality to counter the argument that this should play mp3s. The root source of this feature request is that people want to swap between watching a video, and listening to music. Instead of making our application do everything (which is very tricky), we can make it easier for a user to swap into an app which can play mp3s.

I’ve not looked at any of this yet, and to test we only have an R4 and a Supercard Lite, which might be problematic if everyone implements soft reset in a different way.

I believe there are two libraries for soft reset: libcartreset and rebootlib. See http://dev-scene.com/NDS/DOCliblist

A Sound recorder that records from the mic and stores the file created on the storage of the flash card e.g. microSD.

We’re not going to extend this to allow recording, as the code that runs on the NDS is playback only. The microphone quality on the NDS is quite poor, too.

As I’m Polish, I have to watch some movies with subtitles (I can understand, what actors are saying, but… I’m a lazy man :P). So, could you do reading subtitles written in Micro DVD Player format ( “{xxxx}{yyyy} Text” etc.)? I would be very grateful, because I don’t like adding subtitles directly into avi file, and then converting it into dsv…

Interesting idea, and one which would be reasonable, as DSVideo files render small text quite well. No promises, but it’s possible.

If you’d implement this it will be cool! Thanks for fast answer :D

This anime / foreign film fan would love the subtitle feature to be included. I’m not too sure about the Micro DVD player format, but it might be fine.

I just looked closer at Micro DVD Format, and I must say, that it’s not possible to implement this in DSVideo, as it’s based on frames, not seconds. Maybe SRT format? :) And different encodings would be a good addition…

I’ve replied here and given the subtitle discussion its own thread.

I have some suggestions:

- soft reset
- headphones, stereo or mono support??

Ok I understand soft reset, and we’ve had some discussion of it up a few replies, but what do you mean by “headphones, stereo or mono support?” Do you mean the ability to encode a stereo video down to mono?

It would be nice to utilize slot-2 cards that have 16 to 32 megabytes of extra ram. You could for example delay for 30 second playing the file and compute the first frames (sth like a buffer). In that way chopping in certain positions of the files would be eliminated.

There’s no possible way we can make use of extra RAM to help with skipping, as it’s entirely caused by processing starvation. Even if we did buffer the decoded frames, that represents huge synchronisation issues, and it would mean UI unresponsiveness. The only solution is to either make optimisation improvements in the underlying code, or to overclock the ARM9, as someone has suggested.

I’ll be waiting for the subtitle opcion :)
I’d like a way to change the default directory, and more items in the file browers. Been able to see only 4 items at once is not very confortable.

Does the speed of the flash memory in which the videos are stored affect performance ?

IMO yes, because games/apps on slower flashcards are executed slower.

So buying a CF card and a proper adaptor would help.

Also completely disabling ds graphics sub-core would increase performance. A button should be used to activate it again maybe :)

You could support another video format with smaller compression rate because the capacity of the flash-cards increases every year.

I’ld like the option to limit the file browser to the base directory (and its subdirectories).

I’ve got a 3-year old son who likes to play with my NDS. When he plays with DSVideo he regularly ends up in the root directory of the flash card with all the data directories and I need to get him back on track to watch a video. If you could disable the “Go back” button in the base directory, that would solve this problem. Also, most people will put all videos there anyway, so this option should clean up the interface for most of us.

Oh, and about the cleaning up … could you hide the file extension please, it serves no purpose.

yes the ability to encode a stereo video down to mono.

Thankyou for your reply to my request!!