GBA Movie Player -- not bad!

Hardware and technical stuff
1

I’d been putting “Between the Lions” and “Zoboomafoo” episodes on my Pocket PC for my son to watch on long road trips or plane flights. Worked pretty well, but there’s that factor of using a $400 device that’s not really designed to hold up to handling by a two-year-old… He’s a very good kid, but occasionally two-year-olds just get the urge to toss things. :)

So I figured I’d give the Game Boy Advance Movie Player sold by Lik-Sang a shot. At $25 (I already have a few CF cards), it seemed worth a try.

I have to say, the results are impressive for what it is. You have to use a converter to convert music, video, photo, and ebook files before they can be copied to the CF card. No, I wouldn’t want to use it to watch a special-effects-laden movie where I want to see all the details, but for entertaining the kiddo or killing time on a plane flight, it does the job. And it’s way cheaper and smaller than a portable DVD player + extra battery.

The frame rate could be better, and it doesn’t do really fast action very well, but for the price it’s pretty spectacular. The converter is slow on high quality, but I just let it run overnight. Be nice if they’d open-source the video format.

Nintendo has announced their own model for release in Japan. That one will have hardware acceleration, and likely be even better. But I bet it won’t be $25, and who knows if it will hit the US market? (Though it seems like it would be a good product to launch at about the time the PSP ships…)

2

Sounds good. How much for shipping?

3

$6. Took about a week and a half.

4

Sweet!

5

So I decided to test how long it would play video with the headphones attached, to see if I needed to set up a recharge solution for long plane rides, etc.

On my year-old GBA SP, video has now been playing, with full-volume sound through headphones, for 11 hours. The power light finally turned red about 10 minutes ago, but it’s still going.

Dang. Not bad a’tall!

6

What’s this it says at their site about playing FC games? I assume that’s Flash Card games so you could load ROMs onto it and play them?

7

The card supports the NES emulator, so you can play NES games on the GBA. FC stands for Famicom.

8

I don’t understand how you get content onto the CF card to play on the player.

9

USB CF card reader on your computer. They cost about $10.

There’s a Windows converter program that converts movies, pictures, mp3s, and txt files to GBA Movieplayer format.

10

It was the card reader that I was missing. I knew the software “converted” media into GBA readable format.

Thanks.