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Hardware video-decoder cartridge for the Nintendo DS

Cory Doctorow at 11:26 pm Tue, Jun 30, 2009

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The iPlayer is a hardware video-decoder for your Nintendo DS. It plugs into your cartridge slot, and uses its on-board processor to send video in a variety of formats (avi, mov, RealPlayer, wmv, DivX, Flash, 3GP, asf, mpeg) to the screen and speakers. You load the video through a MicroSD card. Haven't tried it, got no idea if it's any good, but the premise is delightful.

iPlayer (via Red Ferret)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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  • Anonymous

    What a great idea.
    iPlayer supports FLAC.

  • Anonymous

    thought it was funny that the their site defines divx as the circuit city dvd rental system and not the codec

    I wonder if it plays divx discs?

  • Daemon

    Great idea. Come out with something like this, months after the DSi comes out – with no cartridge slot.

    Sure, there are tons of DS’s out there, but still seems like a flawed idea.

  • The Thompson Five

    The DSi has a cart slot for the new style carts. Nintendo only got rid of the old GBA style cart slot.

  • Anonymous

    The DSi has no cartridge slot?

    err.. sorry kind sir, you have some very flawed information there..

    the DSi has no slot-2 (GBA slot), but it does still have slot-1 (the slot for nintendo DS games) which is what this cartridge is.

  • jtegnell

    Aren’t there a million other products that can do this already?

  • stockholm

    I’ve been able to play mpeg movies on the DS for years now, but the encoding process has always been a pain – limited file sizes and funky encoding utilities (and no mac support). If this product solves this problem then it will be a late win now that everyone seemingly has a device that can do it better on a larger screen.

  • dole

    Aye, Moonshell has had .DPG format video support since the beginning of DS (possibly GBA?) homebrew. The problem was converting it into that wretched format. I assume most of us gadgeteers probably have a phone that’s capable of something close to this now anyways, but it’s always cool to see what people think up for Nintendo’s handhelds, even back to the original Gameboy. (… RealMedia? People still use Real? I don’t think I’ve seen a necessity for playing those since like… ’98?)

    Here’s another very cool DS third-party add-on that I read about in the past few days:

    Ranger, a GPS nav system using Google Maps, and a review for it by GBATemp.

  • Adam Stanhope

    I bought the Sansa TakeTV – a product that was advertised here on BB, believe it or not!

    It is a small base that plugs into the television and accepts an 8 gig flash drive onto which one can load .avi and .divx files.

    Great idea – mysteriously discontinued. I see them on eBay every once and awhile.