Hacking M3 sakura media player

[kok]

Hi everyone,

Sorry for making the bad start, i hope we can start over

After reading the M3 sakura can play music within the home menu, i'd like to know wich you prefer.

Moonshell or the M3 sakura player...

 

[Urza]

Neither.

lmp-ng.

 

[Geo411m]

Hi everyone,

Sorry for making the bad start, i hope we can start over

After reading the M3 sakura can play music within the home menu, i'd like to know wich you prefer.

Moonshell or the M3 sakura player...

I prefer Sakura, it's nice to be able to do everything from within the firmware.

 

[Toni Plutonij]

Well, as M3 Sakura is actually modified MoonShell, it makes no difference to me in term of quality (and it seems that Sakura has even improved quality)..It's just matter of preference, and I like to do it all directly from GUI, so Sakura is my choice..But to play .dsm files or some other music types, you will have to use MoonShell or some other player..

 

[thedicemaster]

i tested, and came to the following scorings in video quality:
M3manager built-in:6/10(because it plays movies without errors/freezes)
moonshell:7/10(has improved quality, but still visible distortion due to video compression)
sakura built-in:9/10(windows media player style controlls, near perfect video with only a very fine "grid" visible if you keep your DS too close to your eyes)

testing was done with the movie "final fantasy VII, advent children"
i also doubt i would ever score a DS-media player higher than 9/10.

 

[visitor000]

I don't see any differences in quality (maybe source video file is not very high quality).

Comparing to standalone Moonshell 171+1: Sakura's seeking is much faster - I don't know how much exactly, but it looks like at least 2 times faster (maybe more), I had to wait like 20-30 seconds in Moonshell waiting till it seeks to specified position, now it takes very short time. Sakura's GUI is fantastic.

There is no point in comparing Sakura's video player with pre-Sakura's (original M3 Real firmware) built-in player. In old firmware player was very very very slow. Didn't play DPG3 format (not sure about DPG2) etc.

So far I'm very impressed with Sakura firmware - the most cool thing is almost instant start-up time, and that it remembers what it was doing before shutdown (saves last folder and file selection).

Overall it looks like big improvement.

P.S. Does anyone know if 128 file per folder limit fixed or not in Sakura?

 

[thedicemaster]

the fact that m3sakura runs so smooth is because the devs cheat.
they allow m3sakura to do more memory-intensive things because they added a 16MB swapfile.
and i wouldn't be surprised if they overclocked the cpu's
(the battery light's blinking speed in standby/wifi is said to be based on proccesor speed, and in m3sakura it blinks a lot faster than in games)

 

[11gardir]

I don't see any differences in quality (maybe source video file is not very high quality).

Comparing to standalone Moonshell 171+1: Sakura's seeking is much faster - I don't know how much exactly, but it looks like at least 2 times faster (maybe more), I had to wait like 20-30 seconds in Moonshell waiting till it seeks to specified position, now it takes very short time. Sakura's GUI is fantastic.

There is no point in comparing Sakura's video player with pre-Sakura's (original M3 Real firmware) built-in player. In old firmware player was very very very slow. Didn't play DPG3 format (not sure about DPG2) etc.

So far I'm very impressed with Sakura firmware - the most cool thing is almost instant start-up time, and that it remembers what it was doing before shutdown (saves last folder and file selection).

Overall it looks like big improvement.

P.S. Does anyone know if 128 file per folder limit fixed or not in Sakura?

I think the 128 files thing is actually to do with the limitations of FAT32 rather than Sakura.

 

[visitor000]

I don't see any differences in quality (maybe source video file is not very high quality).

Comparing to standalone Moonshell 171+1: Sakura's seeking is much faster - I don't know how much exactly, but it looks like at least 2 times faster (maybe more), I had to wait like 20-30 seconds in Moonshell waiting till it seeks to specified position, now it takes very short time. Sakura's GUI is fantastic.

There is no point in comparing Sakura's video player with pre-Sakura's (original M3 Real firmware) built-in player. In old firmware player was very very very slow. Didn't play DPG3 format (not sure about DPG2) etc.

So far I'm very impressed with Sakura firmware - the most cool thing is almost instant start-up time, and that it remembers what it was doing before shutdown (saves last folder and file selection).

Overall it looks like big improvement.

P.S. Does anyone know if 128 file per folder limit fixed or not in Sakura?

I think the 128 files thing is actually to do with the limitations of FAT32 rather than Sakura.

No, it's definitely firmware's limit, because in FAT32 the maximum number of files per directory is 65535 (except root directory).
In old firmware they probably put this limit, because they didn't want to use more memory for file enumeration, but as thedicemaster said, they use swap file in Sakura and maybe there is no 128 files limit anymore. I'm going to test it next week...

 

[visitor000]

I've found a bug in Sakura's video player - It does not play some DPG3 videos.
I have few hundreds small video files in DPG3 format (OGG audio) and they cannot be played in Sakura's video player it crashes with such error (taken from system\m3sakura\logbuf.txt):

Shell_FAT_fopen_Split=/vid/B105ST~1.DPG
Shell_FAT_fopen_Split=/vid/B105ST~1.DPG
CreateBurstList.
Index=0 Sector=0x250a10 Count=1648
Index=1 Sector=0xfffffff Count=0
GOPListCount=12,pGOPList=0x2170968
Setup limitter for RGB24.
FrameCacheInfo: FramesCount=16, BufferSizeByte=98304, TotalSize=1572864, maxsize=1605632.
FreeMem=425984byte
Fatal error: unknown audio format. (3)

These files are very small mostly less then 500k in size - Moonshell 171 plays them ok.
I have few bigger DPG3 files (about 30 MB in size) and they play ok in Sakura.

 

[visitor000]

I've found a bug in Sakura's video player - It does not play some DPG3 videos.
I have few hundreds small video files in DPG3 format (OGG audio) and they cannot be played in Sakura's video player it crashes with such error (taken from system\m3sakura\logbuf.txt):

Shell_FAT_fopen_Split=/vid/B105ST~1.DPG
Shell_FAT_fopen_Split=/vid/B105ST~1.DPG
CreateBurstList.
Index=0 Sector=0x250a10 Count=1648
Index=1 Sector=0xfffffff Count=0
GOPListCount=12,pGOPList=0x2170968
Setup limitter for RGB24.
FrameCacheInfo: FramesCount=16, BufferSizeByte=98304, TotalSize=1572864, maxsize=1605632.
FreeMem=425984byte
Fatal error: unknown audio format. (3)

These files are very small mostly less then 500k in size - Moonshell 171 plays them ok.
I have few bigger DPG3 files (about 30 MB in size) and they play ok in Sakura.

Ok, this is definitely caused by OGG audio format in DPG3. I've compared formats of few working and non-working files and all non-working files have audio in OGG format. DPG3 files with "mpeg1-audio-layer-2 (mp2)" audio work ok. So, Sakura's video player does not support DPG3 fully (does not support OGG audio, like Moonshell does).

 

[Toni Plutonij]

Well, they probably removed some stuff to make it faster or more compatible in some other segments..

 

[Flameburst]

I think they're the same, but i prefer using the Sakura Media player instead of opening moonshell. It saves me time since I don't watch videos on my m3.

 

[visitor000]

P.S. Does anyone know if 128 file per folder limit fixed or not in Sakura?

I've just put 280 video files to same folder and all of them are visible and can be played.
In previous version of firmware it does not show the full list as it does in Sakura. So even if there is some limit on number of files per folder in Sakura - it's higher than in older firmware.

Can somebody check it with more than 127 NDS files in folder?

 

[hobbles]

I have a small niggle. When using sakura's media functions, certain audio files seem to be very "left speaker oriented" and almost no sound comes out of the right speaker. Same goes for headphones. Though when i boot into dedicated sakura, both work fine. Any ideas?

 

[thedicemaster]

I have a small niggle. When using sakura's media functions, certain audio files seem to be very "left speaker oriented" and almost no sound comes out of the right speaker. Same goes for headphones. Though when i boot into dedicated sakura, both work fine. Any ideas?

did you try those music files first on your computer with sound balance on center?
and, are they mono or stereo?

 

[hobbles]

Both stereo, both work fine on pc/ipod/anything I have ever tried them on. I wouldn't be complaining if I knew it was the audio file. Also, they work fine under dedicated moonshell.

Ahh, I see, sorry, my previous post was meant to read "Though when I boot into dedicated moonshell, both work fine. Any ideas?"

 

[visitor000]

Found another problem in Sakura's video player:

Yesterday was watching a movie encoded in first version of DPG (tag "DPG0"). It does not have and index for a fast seeking - not great but I could live with that. At some point I had to pause the video and switch Nintendo off. Later when I turned it on it hung, with both screens in gray color. This is due to playback resume function. I don't know if it was seeking to the last position and that's why it appeared to be hung.
I waited for a few minutes and it didn't resume - maybe I had to wait longer and seek would complete, but I'm not a patient man and thought that it just hung. At first I could not avoid this "hanging", because after each restart it wanted to continue playback, and hangs.

I've tried pressing different buttons during restart, hoping that it will cancel playback, but it didn't help - it always tries to continue playback, and hangs.

Luckily, pressing "Start" button during startup managed to solve the problem by starting playback from the beginning of the file. so it didn't hang and I could cancel it.

I don't know if there is some buttons combination, which can be pressed during startup and will cancel any playback. But it would be cool to have it. For example imagine that Nintendo crashed during playing some corrupted mp3 or dpg file and you restart it, but it starts playing same file and crashes again... so it would be nice to be able to press some button(s) and boot without continuing playback.

 

[daisun]

Hopefully, pressing "Start" button during startup managed to solve the problem by starting playback from the beginning of the file. so it didn't hang and I could cancel it.

So did pressing 'start' during startup stop the resume playback function or not? You've found quite a major problem there. Anyone else experience similar issues?

 

[visitor000]

Hopefully, pressing "Start" button during startup managed to solve the problem by starting playback from the beginning of the file. so it didn't hang and I could cancel it.

So did pressing 'start' during startup stop the resume playback function or not? You've found quite a major problem there. Anyone else experience similar issues?

It didn't. But it started playing that movie from the beginning (so it didn't start seeking to the middle of that big DPG0 file), so video player GUI appeared and I could pause/stop the playback.