We’re now a little over a month on from our initial release, and the response has been incredible. We use Google Analytics on the site to keep track on how many people visit, and we thought it would be interesting to share some stats.

Since the launch, we’ve had roughly 30,000 unique visitors from 116 different countries. Our forums have over 500 posts, and we’ve expanded the number of custom DLDI patches to cover most of the popular homebrew cards, with many members of the homebrew community contributing compiled patches. Team Cyclops, the developers behind the CycloDS Evolution card were even kind enough to provide an updated patch themselves.

To give an idea of the makeup of the homebrew community operating systems, 82% of the encoder downloads were for Windows, 10% for Linux and 8% for Mac OS X. I’m pleased that we’ve managed to achieve a cross-platform release (even if the Windows encoder’s reliance on .NET 3.5 has been frustrating), as there is a sizeable audience of Mac and Linux users. If any of our readers are handy with compiling cross-platform code on Windows, please get in touch on the forums.

Also in the forums is a guide on getting the best encode quality created by ekolimits. This demonstrates how you can select the best command-line options when encoding a video. Lastly, user zanzer7 has created a Windows GUI encoder tool , for those of you who don’t like to delve into cmd.exe.

We have a feature requests thread if people want to suggest ideas for future releases, and we also have a few outstanding issues with audio quality and video codec support, and they are being tracked in a few threads in the forums. We are looking into these issues, but can’t give any current indication of fixes.

Lastly, for those of you who commented on the original post but never saw it go live, I apologise. The moderation queue was not set up to email me when comments were pending, and were approved much later.

We've released version 1.01 of DSVideo, now available from the downloads page.

This is a bug fix release for the encoder and should fix a few problems with some videos. In particular, if you have seen the error message "Unhandled input video frame rate 23.979144" or if the encoder has just frozen before printing any message at all, please retry using the new version.

In addition, the encoder can now be run with just the name of the input video file (no need to pass the output file name), and it will use the video file name with the extension '.dsv'.

A complete list of changes in the encoder is included in the download, in the file CHANGES. The decoder hasn't changed in this release.

If you have any comments or feedback, please let us know in the forums!

DSVideo is using the ARM7 processor in the NDS for all file operations. This is slightly different from most other homebrew, which uses the ARM9, and it means that standard DLDI patches may not work. In order to create a working patch, the build process for DLDI needs to be modified.

Download the DLDI source for your card from Chishm’s DLDI page, and open the Makefile in the root directory of the source code in a text editor. The contents should look like the section below, and the lines that need changes have been highlighted.

#---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# options for code generation
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ARCH    :=    -mthumb-interwork

CFLAGS    :=    -g -Wall -O2\
            -mcpu=arm7tdmi -mtune=arm7tdmi -fomit-frame-pointer\
            -ffast-math \
            $(ARCH)

CFLAGS    +=    $(INCLUDE) -DARM9 -fPIC

CXXFLAGS    := $(CFLAGS) -fno-rtti -fno-exceptions

ASFLAGS    :=    -g $(ARCH)
LDFLAGS    =    -specs=$(CURDIR)/../$(SPECS)/dldi.specs -T $(CURDIR)/../$(SPECS)/dldi.ld -g $(ARCH) -mno-fpu -Wl,-Map,$(TARGET).map

LIBS    := -lnds9

The highlighted lines should be changed to read:

CFLAGS    +=    $(INCLUDE) -DARM7 -fPIC

... and …

LIBS    := -lnds7

Once changed, compile as normal, and the patch is now compatible with DSVideo. The downloads page has been updated with ARM7 DLDI patches for popular cards, such as the Supercard DS, M3CF and M3SD. If you come across a card which doesn’t work, please post to the DSVideo DLDI forum topic.

We are proud to announce the first public release of DSVideo - an open source wavelet video codec for the Nintendo DS. To run it on the NDS, you will need some kind of homebrew card, such as the Supercard Lite, or the R4 (both of which are tested and known to work).

We have a short flash video running through most of the common operations:

The encoder is multi-platformed and can take a wide variety of inputs. Please check the features section for more information on how it works.

There is a public forum area, so if you have any feedback, let us know there.