I recently bought a Nintendo DS Lite and desperately wanted to play movies on it.  Not entirely happy with the offerings from Moonshell, I decided to search for an alternative.  After some light googling I stumbled across an excellent DS Video Player / Encoder written by Dominic and Nick Ludlam at http://nick.recoil.org.

The DS Video encoder software works just fine if you enjoy using the terminal command line but, I prefer the Mac GUI.   Seeing that there were a couple of Windows GUI’s available and nothing for Mac I set about writing an easy to use and nice looking front-end for the DSV Encoder.  It had to be easy enough for my Dad to use :o)

If you simply want to encode an AVI into DSV you just have to click on ‘Source’, select your file, click ‘Add to Queue’ and then ‘Start Encoding’.  This will by default encode your video at 30,000 BPF in full screen (4:3).  If you want a higher or lower video quality or to see the whole movie in widescreen (16:9) click on the ‘Advanced’ button to change these options before you ‘Add to Queue’.  The Advanced settings allow you to take advantage of the most used switches in the DSVideo Encoder. 

What’s New in Version 1.4

Version 1.4 now runs on Tiger (10.4) upwards and has a queue system allowing a number of source files all with their own unique destination  path and advanced settings to be stacked in a queue.  This is ideal if you have a lot of source AVI files that need to be encoded unattended overnight.  Source files can be added using the ‘Add to Queue’ button from the toolbar.  To manage the queue click on the ‘Queue‘ button.  You can ‘Remove‘ items or ‘Empty‘ the queue and start again.  When you are happy with the contents of the queue click ‘Done‘ and ‘Start Encoding’. 

Oooops, if encoding has started but, you forgot to add something to the queue or added something by mistake! Easy, you can simply select a new source and add it whilst the encoder is running, you can even remove items from the queue that are not in the Encoding state.

The customizable toolbar is also a new feature, it can be arranged however you like it.  The old buttons have remained in this version until i’ve adjusted to the new toolbar :o)

It’s a cocoa application and has been tested on an Intel Mac running Leopard (10.5) and Tiger (10.4).   Please note that the DS Video encoder will only run on an Intel based Mac.

This ‘home-brew’ application makes my DS Video encoding life a little more pleasurable.  I hope it does for you too.   To download the zipped application, click on the big picture above.  Unzip it and double click on the ‘DSVideo GUI Encoder’ application.