Slashdot Mirror
Nintendo DS to Play Movies?
swisener writes "An article at CNN speculates that the Nintendo DS could have multimedia playback, making it more of a competitor to Sony's PSP. If true, it will be interesting to see whether or not the big N can be successful with something other than a pure gaming machine."
two-hour movie (fit onto a 128 MB flash cartridge
That's roughly 1MB a minute, not too shabby compression though probably really tiny resolution. Considering that the cartridges for the DS are likely to be proprietary, don't get your hopes up that you'll be able to toss your own movies on the system. In addition, Nintendo will have to scare up some relationships with hollywood to get movie rights.
All in all, it sounds like this one will likely sputter out due to the (likely) proprietary nature of both the cartridges and the movie compression and the difficulty of getting studios to sign onto a new format (does anyone remember how FEW 8mm hollywood movies were released (meant to compete with VHS late in the game)).
God Bless America. Why? Did it sneeze?
I think what Nintendo should focus on is improving the gamer's *gaming* experience otherwise they stand to lose the very users that made the Gameboy as successful as it is today.
Just ask Nokia, they forgot that their core market was cellphones and instead of leveraging their effort at polishing up their cellphones they ventured off into gaming with less than satisfatory results.
In addition, movies on the go demand a lot more from the DS including copyright protection etc which, Nintendo shouldn't IMHO delve into...
In short, Nintendo should put their boffins to good use figuring out how to take advantage of the dual screens for gaming and not for movies.
Now, WHY OH WHY would they bother with a portable that could play movies too? It's a proprietary format which means that you couldn't (legally) pop a cart into your computer and copy a movie over, so this means that either 1) the film industry would have to adopt a new media format, or the more likely 2) there would be five or six films tops for the DS.
I don't think this is exactly a bright idea. Nintendo has *always* focused on making a gaming device and not a multi-use media centre; I have a hard time believing that the Big N is going to deviate from 25-odd years of success *now*.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
Actually, because it's Nintendo, it's doubtful that they intend for this ability to be used to actually watch movies. It was more likely a demonstration of streaming audio and video from a DS cartridge. With no technical details to go on, it's hard to guess, but I'd wager that such a demo would be used to showcase greatly improved data transfer rates. That in turn could be a sign that the DS game cartridges will hold a lot more data than previously speculated. At any rate, the only concrete information in the article is that "a two-hour movie (fit onto a 128 MB flash cartridge) has been successfully demonstrated on the DS." That's not even enough information to justify the wild speculation I just engaged in, so I'll just go back to waiting quietly for more details before I jump to any conclusions.