ds video players & formats – a comparison

I’ve been using moonshell to watch dpg movies for as long as I’ve had my M3 DS Simply. But lately, I’ve seen updates and information about other players. I decided to check out these other formats and players to see if I could a more friendly player interface and maybe even better video quality. Here are the formats and players that I tried and compared.

• DSM [DSM Play 0.7]
• DSV [DSVideo 1.01]
• DPG [Moonshell 1.71]
• AVI [Tuna-viDS v1.0]

Disclaimer: I’m not an expert on video formats. I know enough to be dangerous. I acknowledge that I could have errors in my descriptions, but my point is to also approach and judge these tools and formats as something of a layman. I’m going to learn about them, but I have no desire hours learning how to get the videos just right in conversion or how to use all the player and tools completely.

First, all videos must be reformatted for the DS: you can’t take a ripped AVI, for example, and play it as is on your DS. So, this is a disadvantage common to all of these formats and players. The question is probably which is the easiest to convert, but there are file size and quality considerations.

File size

I started with an hour-long tv episode that I had recorded, which as an avi file is 359 megabytes. I then converted the original avi to the different player formats in as similar settings as I could. Here are the results from smallest to largest:

1. DS avi: 92 megabytes [25% of original]
2. DPG: 119 megabytes [33% of original]
3. DSV: 153 megabytes [43% of original]
4. DSM: 1.65 gigabytes! [4.5 times larger than original]

Conversion speed

Smaller files don’t always mean faster conversion. I noticed that with small files, converting to DS avi was a little faster than converting to DPG.

1. DPG: 8-10 minutes
2. DS avi: 52 minutes
3. DSV: 53 minutes
4. DSM: over 2 hours

Quality and Performance

This is a tough category because the quality can depend on the type of video, animated or live, as well action and lighting.

1. DSM:
   The DSM movie quality was excellent, and I didn’t see video skips, color issues, or pixelation. Jumping to different positions in the movie seemed faster than DPG, too. Forwarding and rewinding seem the fastest of all formats.
2. DPG:
   The default settings in batchDPG produce accetable video quality, although it seemed to skip at times and the colors could have a blotchy look to them in places. The good thing is that with batchDPG, you can dial up the quality and produce video that comes a bit closer to that of DSM. However, the quality can vary with the settings. [I found some good recommendations here.]
3. [tie]
   DS avi:
   Tuna-viDS is limited to 12 frames per second playback. I thought the video quality for tuna-vids and DSvideo were somewhat similar and noticeably lesser than DPG when it was dialed down to even 15 frames per second.
   DSV:
   Because DSV is a wavelet compression, and it is limited to 12.5 frames per second, which makes it somewhat more choppy than DPG or the AVI format. The quality also jumped out as lower than DPG and appeared to have more artifacts and pixelation. You also must have .NET Framework 3.0 or later. Considering the larger file size, I’m surprised that the quality was so noticeably lower than that of DPG.

Interface

Aesthetics are always nice, but what I was looking for was a] how easy were the app controls to find and use, b] how complete the controls were, and c] how responsive was the interface. Bonus point to the interface that looked real purty.

1. DSM [DSM Play]:
   DSM Play has a GUI interface, which is a little cramped but works pretty well. You have to use the included executable to create .nds files for all the different types of homebrew carts. But when it starts, the app provides a nice guide to the controls in the top screen, and the controls and the video list is in the bottom screen. [You must have the videos in a /video folder in the root of your cart.] Besides having a position slider, DSMplay also provides a thumbnail allowing to view and select a frame. Most of the play controls using the different buttons on the DS. I also liked that infantile provided tools for creating skins for DSM Play.
2. DSV [DSVideo]:
   This was the best looking interface of the bunch in many ways, at least at first glance. It included control buttons in the app for stop, play, rewind, and forward. The GUI includes a slider so that you can position at any point in the movie. You can also use the buttons, and when you close the DS, the buttons are disabled. The movie listing was attractive but a bit too spacious, as only three file names or folders fit in one screen.
3. DPG [Moonshell]:
   Moonshell has what some consider an ugly interface because of the scrolling bios messages as it boots. Unfortunately, too, its control are not obvious: it has GUI controls but relies on the control pad. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve quit a movie accidentally when I wanted to pause it. That’s when I get frustrated with the positioning: I have to use the fast foward button. It has a seek/position bar, but it is very inaccurate.However, it does include online help as well as bookmarking.
4. AVI [Tuna-viDS]:
   Like Moonshell, it uses the control pad instead of GUI controls, which are limited to play/pause and forward/rewind by 1 frame. The file list is the basic font [no graphics], which I find almost unreadable, and the list items have the opposite problem of DSvideo: the items are too close together.

Conversion tool Basiscally, the conversion tools are of two groups: two with GUIs and two that use command-line interfaces. I didn’t explore the range of conversion options so I didn’t check the limitations of each. For novices, the GUIs make a big difference.

1. DPG:
   here are a couple of options for conversion tools, but I have found batchDPG to be the easiest and the fastest. It has a GUI, too. There have been unofficial updates since the original author released the 1.0 version. [See the original site for documentation.] BatchDPG requires installing avisynth and .Net Framework 1.1 or later.
2. DSM:
   DSM has its own converter, DSM Encoder. It’s very similar to the encoder that comes with moonshell. It has a GUI and is pretty easy to use.
3. DS avi:
   I took chism’s recommendation and used ffmpeg to convert the files, using the sample command and options on chism’s page. It has no GUI, so I created a batch file to convert the files.
4. DSV:
   DSV comes with its conversion tool which is another command-line interface. I happened to find some batch files that made conversion easier.

Conclusions

Depending on the size of your transflash, file size becomes a significant determiner in selecting a movie format and player. If you have 8 or more gigabytes of storage, using DSM is more of an option. I have 1 gigabyte of storage, but half of it is taken up with games, apps, and other types of files, such comicbook DS files. However, between the large files and the slowest conversion, DSM is perhaps something I’d use for special movies that I truly enjoyed.

DPG is the easiest to convert and is not that much larger than the AVIs, and the DPG quality is more than acceptable. Moonshell is a stable app that can also play music files and read ebooks. Adding to the equation all the DPG conversions available moonbook and other sites, I haven’t seen enough file space savings or UI features to warrant moving to DSVideo or Tuna-viDS.

My pick: Moonshell and DPG