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Friday, December 17, 2004

Nintendo Media Player: Hurrah for Open Standards

This is a great slap in the chops of the Sony PSP. “Sure we can do video, and we can do it with Open Standards AND the memory cards you already have…” Some will call it a reaction to the media player aspect of the PSP, but third-party Nintendo players predates Sony by a few years. Nintendo even sell pre-recorded content in Japan, and now they’re directly in the hardware game.

As my niece in California would say, “it’s hekka cool” - you’ve got a Gameboy SP or a Nintendo DS and you’d like to take your music, yesterday’s podcast or last night’s big TV-of-the-Week movie along on your long, lonely bus trip to Minsk. What to do?

Well, Nintendo’s Media Player is a really decent implementation of a media player—Gizmodo has a nice note on it. There’s a link below—but the big news is that their hardware plays back un-DRM’d MP3 music and MPEG-4 video, at a decent 352 by 288 pixel resolution. You can get 4 hours of video or up to 15 hours of MP3s, depending on the size card you use.

But there it is again - you don’t have to use the uber-expensive Sony Memory Stick Duo cards…you use SD ram, likely a memory card you already have for your camera or perhaps an older MP3 player. They’re certainly cheaper than the Sony memory; a quick Google finds 1GB for $75.00 US and you don’t have to worry about someone changing the cards specs later after you’ve bought your card.

For a historical example: I have a Sony Ericsson P800 phone - spent a chunk of change to buy it nearly 2 years ago - and over 100 euros to buy a 128MB Memory when you could buy easily twice that in SD ram for at least half the price. But lo and behold, larger cards came out - 256MB and 512MB - but I can’t use it on my little P800…have to buy a new P900. Bah!

Sony still uses a razor-and-blades philsophy to push not only their media but also their standards. The problem is that there’s no reasonable competative reason to endorse their proprietary standards while efficient standards exist. Their ATRAC compression scheme is proof of this, and they’re learning their lesson slowly. But while the PSP has taken the first step by adding MP3 and MPEG4, they still use proprietary, expensive memory cards. This will limit how many people do this.

And to add insult to injury, Nintendo’s SD-based media players last twice as long for video. And it works on not only two million or so Nintendo DS systems, but the 21-million-plus Gameboy Advances out there. That is a HUGE existing platform for MPEG4 adoption! I could watch last night’s movie and dozens of songs or podcasts on my bus trip…all on one charge.

Carrying multiple SD cards sure beats carrying multiple batteries…
Wonderful. Hurrah for supporting existing technology so well.

Gizmodo::Official Nintendo Game Boy MPEG4 Player