Dreamcast MP3 Player

by : Strat76 Return to the main hall

RARE ELEMENTS

Introduction

This will allow you to play back video on the Dreamcast. with playback controls, they are displayed on screen when you start up. there is Play, Pause, F/Forward, Rewind, skip movie and timer display.
It is versitile, handling multiple movies (playback is in alphabetical order I believe) and supporting a range of formats (listed below.
There are some limitations, these however are limitations of the Dreamcast hardware, not this software. I recorded some VCD quality Mpeg of my little girls dance show that I'd captured from camcorder, there is a very slight stutter at some parts. Overall it is an excellent way to digitally store your home movies without having to go out and buy a VCD player. Lowering the bitrate helps but the picture starts to become pixelated.

Video Formats

This list is taken from the readme file suplied in the gypplay .zip

.mpg (MPEG-1 only)
.mpeg (MPEG-1 only)
.dat (MPEG-1 only)
.avi (no odd codecs!)
.m1v (MPEG-1 video, no audio)
.asf (no odd codecs! MPEG-4/DivX is NOT supported!)
.sfd (v1.01 SFD format works, but no audio. Newer SFDs not supported.)

As I said above VCD quality Mpeg is a little jumpy, these settings seem to work very well for Mpeg, the results work especially well with amimations (lower colour depth)

Video:
Bitrate: 656 Kb/s
Width: 320 pixels
Height: 240 pixels
Timebase: 24 frames/sec.

Audio:
Bitrate: 96 Kb/s
Output: Mono

The lowered audio settings are purely to save disk space, the Video rate of 656 Kb/s may seem a strange choise, however, with a audio rate of 96, the system rate is 752Kb/s which is divisible by 16, always a good thing to improve decoding efficiency.

Avi files may playback better, I don't know. However, Mjpeg and DivX codecs are not supported and compressors such as Cinepak will not give you much time on a CD

Creating the Disk

Extract the files in the zip to a folder on the hard drive (e.g. C:\Gypplay\)
Create a new folder within the Gypplay folder called Movie\
Now copy all your Movies to the folder C:\Gypplay\Movie\
In fact the movies can be stored anywhere on the disk, this is just a little tidier

OK that's the file structure taken care of, now to burn it:

Load all the files and folders in the C:\Gypplay\ folder into a data CD project on your burning software.
Set the disk type to:
Mode1
Level2
Joliet File System
Exactly how you achieve these settings will depend on the burning software,
any CD creation software will be capable of doing this.

OK, once you've burned the disk, load up the Utopia boot disk and switch to the Movie disk, full control instructions are displayed
EASY :-)

You could always be really smart and create a self booting disk using the Echelon guide

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