Advance Movie Player

Big Brother started last friday and I could not care less, fed up with all this reality TV crap. Desperate Housewives finishes tonight and I like that for some very strange odd reason. E4 came to freeview on friday which menas I can watch more Scrubs and Smallvilem, me is happy.
Been playin loads of PSO:BB recently, last thursday me and some guys were remembering the good ole days from dreamcast PSO here are some recent PSO:BB pics.

I wanna ride next!

Advance Movie Player- GBA
I got a 1GB Compact flash card for a good price so I thought to myself I might as well get this as it would be good to have something that plays music and theres no way I'm spending money on an I-Pod or those crappy cheap MP3 players.
This advance movie player is independantly made player that supports compact flash, their site is here. It can be brought from Lik Sang for around about £14 which is great value for money.
The review is based on this running on Nintendo DS, if you are expecting high quality movie playback from this thing then you would be a moron, remember the power of the GBA is similer to a SNES with a 32bit RISC, also remeber that this player is not made using a Nintendo development kit but regardless of all that the product is pretty darn good for what it's running on. Before you start using this thing pop to the official site and get the latest firmware upgrade and encoding software.
First off is music, music need to first be converted and cannot be played straight from MP3 form which is annoying at first but the encoding software is very fast. The software will encode to a .gbs file. There are many file conversion modes, the best is 8-1 stereo, this will get the quality and size of your file to that of the MP3 original. The other conversion modes are mono and sound is very disstorted so there is no point in using them. If a file is low in volume then the music converter has an option where you can boost the volume, I used this with a couple of low volume files and it worked really well. When I tested these converted files the quality was great, I plugged in my headphones and could feel the stereo sound, the quality sounded as good as the MP3 but if the source file is poor quality then the the converted file will be poor quality, the software will not enhance the quality of the track. One problem with the software is if you encode too many files at once, after a while it will only encode the first minute of the track. When playing the music on the hardware, up will switch to next track, down to the previous track, right will fast forward 10 seconds and left will rewind 10 seconds, R will pause and L will also skip to next track. There is no playlist support here but with this being firmware upgradable you never know what could come next but it does support file browsing so numbering the files and putting them in specific folder is a cheeky replacement for play lists.
Next up is movie playback, like the music the files these need to be converted, the software has three modes, you might as well use the High Quality mode only, the software supports AVI, qucktime, Real and windows media formats. The software outputs two files a .gbm and like the music a .gbs file. Movie quality is hit and miss, I encoded a episode of Sentai Dekaranger with subs, I could read the subs, sound was great, video kept a decent frame rate although was a bit blocky, it was perfectly watchable. I tested an episode of Family Guy, source file was high quality but the framerate was not good which menat the sound lagged behind, I also did a Futurama, source file was high quality but the framerate dipped a bit in places but was perfectly watchable, last test was South Park, source file was low quality but was perfect! Controls when watching a movie are the same as the music but the fast forward and rewind is a minute this time.
Next up is NES rom support, first off you have to put the Pocket NES emu into the source of your Compact Flash Card, this is a nice feature but is limited, NES games play fine but the ROM size is limited to 256kb which is annoying as many roms are just 1k more lol, also there is no saving and you have to literally turn off the console and reboot if you want to play another ROM as the Exit option does not work properly, hopefully this can be improved in future updates but its still a nice feature.
There is also support for pictures but just like music and movies this has to be converted which makes this feature rather pointless. Last feature is E-book support or actually not E-Book support as it says on the hardware much rather txt file support, this has its uses as you can store game guides on the card for when you go on holiday but this has no find option.
The cart its self is the same size as a GB mono cart, it's big due to the size of compact flash cards, if they went with SD cards the cart could have been much smaller and then Nintendo fans would be able to use those cards for future Nintendo products.
The developers are planning a big update which will use the abilities of DS, hopefully touch screen and better hardware, looking at what they achieved with the GBA hardware the DS upadte could be pretty stunning.
Overall this is a stunning product but it has many flaws. If you want a music player and movie player for your DS or GBA then get this.
Rating- 7 out of 10