How to put movies on a Nintendo DS using a Mac

Posted on November 19, 2007 by blogmywiki

Memo to self, type post – please ignore if you don’t have a Mac and a Nintendo DS…

You will need:

  • A Mac running OS X
  • A Nintendo DS or DS Lite
  • An M3 card or similar to run Moonshell – the homebrew multimedia player
  • The excellent, free Mac/Windows MPEG Streamclip to convert your movie to a 15 fps (frames per second) 256 x 192 resolution AVI with MPEG-2 128 kps sound.
  • You can go command line to convert the movie to a DPG file that Moonshell will play, but much easier to use Mac DPG Converter and Mencoder – make sure you put Mencoder in the same folder as Mac DPG Converter.

    And then there we are, enjoying Shaun the Sheep, transferred off the Humax PVR and onto the small screen – 1 episode clocks in at about 9 MB. Perfect for boredom-relieving.

    • This entry was posted in children, computers, gaming, MacOS X, Nintendo DS. Bookmark the permalink.

    10 Responses to How to put movies on a Nintendo DS using a Mac

    1. Rhys says:
      January 1, 2008 at 2:09 pm

      hello when you say put mencoder and dpg converter in same folder, what do you mean? sorry for being dense….

    4. Rhys says:
      January 2, 2008 at 2:43 pm

      it’s me again lol, i did what you said and everything is running kool but when i put it on my m3 real the audio is at a 10 – 20 lag to the audio…..would you have any idea on how to fix this?

    5. blogmywiki says:
      January 3, 2008 at 12:06 pm

      Hello! I had sound sync problems too, but the sound was ok once I got the movies down to 15 frames per second 256 x 192 resolution using MPEG Streamclip. I found that at higher frame rates or sizes the sound was getting ahead of the pictures very badly.

    6. Rhys says:
      January 4, 2008 at 6:18 am

      hey, thanks for the advice, but with the mac converter where does it give you this option?

    7. blogmywiki says:
      January 4, 2008 at 4:52 pm

      Check you’ve got MPEG Streamclip – there’s a link to it at the top of the page. Open your movie file in MPEG Streamclip and then choose Export > Export to AVI. You should then get a box pop up where you can set the important parameters: 15 fps (frames per second), frame size 256 x 192, with MPEG-2 128 kps sound. Then click on ‘Make AVI’.
      (I’m looking at a Windows version of MPEG Streamclip as I type this but I think the Mac one is the same).
      Hope that helps!

    8. Trish says:
      April 29, 2010 at 2:23 pm

      Hey do you have to use Mac DPG converter and Mencoder or can I just use MPEG Streamclip in order to convert to a dpg file?

      Thanks

    9. blogmywiki says:
      April 29, 2010 at 3:18 pm

      Hi. It’s a long time since I did this as the M3 cards broke and the kids have iPod nanos now. I’m pretty sure I did think I had to use Mac DPG and Mencoder AND Mpeg Streamclip but there may well be a quicker, simpler way.

    10. Ben Smith says:
      December 24, 2011 at 11:14 am

      I converted a movie to a 256×192 avi file as you said using MPEG Streamclip but the DS cannot read an AVI file so it won’t play, it can only read DPG files. Can you help?

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