Following is a breakdown of what you'll have to go through to optimize your videos. It's not a walkthrough or a full-fledged guide. It's more of a tool to help you understand what you have to go through so that you can weigh the cost of a more expensive device versus the immense effort required to get the best quality you can. Many thanks to Ruegore2 from the Lik-Sang Movie Player forums for much of this advice. This guy is a trooper.

- using the latest software to improve your encode times and quality
- minimize the perceived choppiness of your footage
- sync the audio to the video as best you can

Software

The company that produced this device is all over the place. It's got one website for the CompactFlash version of the M2. It's got another website for the SD version of the M2. It's got yet another website for both versions of the M3. It's so convoluted that I really don't even know what the name of the company itself is.

Know that the software used for the M3 can still be used to encode movies for the M2. The problem is that you can't take advantage of the DS-specific functions, such as encoding movie resolutions at the full DS screen resolution, unless you're going to use the CompactFlash card in the M3.

Smoothing out your Video

As the player only plays at 10 frames per second, it'll seem that all is lost. However, you will be able to maximize *which* ten frames are chosen for each second to provide for optimal smoothness. A free piece of software called TMPGEnc allows you to load windows media files (AVI, MPG, as long as it's not Quicktime) and re-encode them into an MPG of any resolution you desire.

I tested this out with both an episode of 24 (approx. 43 minutes) and the E3 2004 Zelda trailer (approx. 1 minute and change). For each movie, I followed Ruegore's advice and forced it to encode at 240x160 resolution. Then I told it to encode at 10 frames per second. Being a much more sophisticated piece of software than the converter, chances are your resulting 10 frame per second video will appear to run smoother.

The episode of 24 took more than an hour to encode. The Zelda trailer took longer considering how short the source material is, clocking in at around seven minutes. Your mileage may vary depending on what kind of computer you've got - you dual-core owners will scoff at my pitiful times.

You can take your finished MPG and encode it using the GBA Movie Player's conversion software, and hopefully, the result should be smoother-playing action.

Syncing the Audio

As my evidence, I used my 24 episode and my Family Guy Episode. The 24 episode DID go through this procedure. The Family Guy Episode did not.

Using an application called VirtualDubMod, I loaded 24 and clicked a button to extract the audio stream as an uncompressed .WAV file. Since 24 was 43 minutes long and the file was over 360 megabytes in size, this process took 17 minutes. Thank goodness for Ossu! Tatakae! Ouendan! to pass the time. (Note that I happened to do this with the E3 Zelda 2004 trailer, which you'll remember is only slightly longer than a minute, and the file extraction took a matter of seconds. Go figure.)

One cool thing about the GBA Movie Player is that its conversion software splits up movies into distinct video and audio files. (For instance, E3Zelda2k4.AVI will become E3Zelda2k4.GBM and E3Zelda2k4.GBS - movie and sound.) Once you've converted your video file through the GBA Movie Player software, you can delete the .GBS file after taking note of what the filename was. Then, you open up the Music Conversion tool, and slap in that .WAV file that you extracted. (I've inconsistenly had trouble encoding large .WAV files in the Music Conversion tool; you may want to convert it into an high bitrate MP3 first before you put it into the Conversion too.) Once it's converted, you just rename it to the same name as the file you deleted.

I'm honestly not sure why or how this works. All I know is that I see what Jack Bauer says the instance he says it, but I see what Peter Griffin says a second after I hear it. You may want to consult the forums for better detail.