Sven Slootweg's Blog

DPG is the video format that is used by the commonly known Moonshell media player, which was developed exclusively for the Nintendo DS. The DPG video format is optimized for watching on the Nintendo DS, minimizing the necessary processing power to play the video, while keeping the quality high and the filesize low. I’ve written a tutorial before on converting video to DPG under Windows. This time, however, I will be talking about Linux. A friend of mine wrote a tutorial on it in Dutch at http://raymii.org/cms/index.php?title=Avi_of_MPG_of_WMV_naar_.dpg_onder_linux_mint_5_of_ubuntu_8.04 and I decided to translate it and put it up here. Credits for the original article go to him.

Step 1: Installing prerequisites
You will need to install mencoder and mplayer first. In Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and various other distro’s that use apt-get, you can use sudo apt-get install mencoder mplayer to achieve this. If you are using CentOS RedHat Enterprise Linux, or another distro using yum, you will first need to add RPMForge to your repository list (https://www.rpmrepo.org/RPMforge), and then use yum install mencoder mplayer in order to install both mencoder and mplayer on your computer. If you don’t have apt-get or yum, try searching on the web for a package for your distro.

Step 2: Downloading the script
You will be using a python script, and a program called ‘mpegstat’, to convert your file to DPG. You can download the package with both mpegstat and the python script at http://relst.nl/downloads/dpgconv_mpegstat.zip. Extract the file into a directory somewhere on your computer, and move the video you want to convert to the same directory. Then open the folder with your terminal, and type ./dpgconv.py ./video.mpg where video.mpg is the filename of the video you moved to the folder.

Step 3: Wait….
The script will now convert your video to DPG format. It will indicate the progress in the terminal. When the script disappears, it is done and you will find a new file in the directory, which is your newly converted video! Simply move it to your flashcard, and play it with Moonshell (or M3 Sakura, for that matter).

Notes:
This was tested on MPG and AVI files. According to the writer of the original article, it also works with WMV files that do not have DRM (Digital Rights Management). If you have any questions, either post them here, 0r send me an e-mail.

When I first wanted to put a video on my Nintendo DS (I had one of those funky R4 flashcards, just for such purposes – no really, I don’t play commercial ROMs on it!) it took me quite some time to figure out how to convert a video to be able to play it on the DS. After some searching, I found out about BatchDPG, a very handy tool for doing this. Much much later I found out about dpgenc, the program that was bundled with MoonShell, the Nintendo DS media player. In this quick tutorial, I will explain how to convert video to DPG, with both BatchDPG and dpgenc.

Step 1: Make sure you have MoonShell
If it came with your flashcard, or you didn’t download it yet, download the latest version from http://home.att.ne.jp/blue/moonlight/. Make sure you get the ZIP version. Extract the ZIP file somewhere, and install MoonShell 2 on your flashcard. Now, I will start with dpgenc. If you want to learn about BatchDPG, just skip to that part.

dpgenc Step 2: Start dpgenc
Go to the place where you extracted MoonShell 2, and go to misctools > dpgtools > dpgenc.exe. Start it, and wait till it has loaded.

dpgenc Step 3: Drag and drop video files
You now have a dpgenc screen in front of you. Go to the folder with your movie files, and drag the file to the dpgenc window. As soon as you release it, it will start converting. You can also use the Get Youtube button to directly convert a YouTube video. Please be aware that YouTube videos can take a long (and I mean long) time to process, especially when choosing a higher quality. When you’re done with this, you can find your DPG files at the path that is displayed on top of the dpgenc window (this is usually your desktop). Just copy them to your MicroSD card, and you’re done! You can now use Moonshell 2 to play the video. (It is highly recommended to use Moonshell 2 instead of Moonshell 1, simply because playback is more stable, and the video quality is way better…)

BatchDPG Step 2: Download BatchDPG and install AviSynth
The current version of BatchDPG (at the time of writing) can be downloaded at http://www.mediafire.com/?d9y2ttr9ylz. Of course you can always use Google to search for “BatchDPG” and download a newer version. After you downloaded it, extract the ZIP file somewhere (this is really important, you can’t run BatchDPG from the ZIP file, not even with WinRAR! It will give encoding errors) and start Avisynth_xxx.exe, where xxx is the AviSynth version number. The AviSynth version number will be different for every BatchDPG version, the AviSynth file in the above download link is named Avisynth_257.exe. Run through the installation, and install everything with default values.

BatchDPG Step 3: Start BatchDPG and add files
When AviSynth is installed, you can run BatchDPG.exe (you just extracted that, remember?) and start adding video files. Just click “Browse” for the video file, and select the file you want to convert. After you clicked OK, copy and paste the Video file path to the Audio file box. Click on Add, and repeat this until you have all video files you want to convert in your list. Then simply click Run and BatchDPG will start converting your files! The DPG files will either be in the same directory as the original video, or in the directory defined in the Settings window.

Should I use dpgenc or BatchDPG?
If you want it to be as easy as possible (drag and drop) dpgenc is for you. However, I have noticed that BatchDPG reads many more file formats (even XViD/DIVX files) that dpgenc cannot read, and BatchDPG also tends to be more stable and crash less often. I am not sure which one is faster though. In short: dpgenc for ease of use, BatchDPG for reliability.

Questions?
Just post a comment

Download source for BatchDPG: http://acemanonline.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/new-batchdpg-released/