Play-Yan Media Adapter

By Spencer . September 29, 2005 . 2:08am

Purchase at Play-Asia

 

Purchase at Lik-Sang

 

Nintendo appeared adamant on having their systems do nothing but play games. The Play-Yan might be a major change in Nintendo’s philosophy. This nifty add on looks like a black GBA cartridge, but it’s really a multimedia player. Gamers can load up MP3s and MPEG4 movies on a SD card, plug the card in their Play-Yan and get going.

 

The package comes in a tiny box containing the Play-Yan adapter, a Gamecube sized software disc with Panasonic’s Media Stage software and a tiny instruction manual. On the side of the cartridge is a little slot for an SD card and the front of the cartridge has a 1/8" standard headphone jack. If you have a Game Boy Advance SP you’ll be happy the headphone jack is there when you want to listen to MP3s. DS owners can use either the Play-Yan’s headphone jack or the standard DS headphone jack.

 

When you start up the software you’ll see a menu with options to listen or watch. Choosing "listen" brings up a menu with a stick figure character on stairs.  Each stair you walk over represents a different folder or song. If you’re over a folder pressing A opens it up. If you’re standing over a song pressing A will start playback. You can fast forward or rewind the song by pressing right or left on the D-pad, respectively. This feature is a good addition when navigating through long live sets. Pressing up or down on the D-pad allows you to change the volume. Holding down the R button gives you to option to change the bass level only. The Play-Yan has some playback options like repeat one and play through an entire folder. You can’t make custom play lists with the software. This isn’t a huge problem to overcome. If you want to make a personal play list all you need to do is make a folder with the songs you want.

 

Having a play list option would fix some of the navigation problems the Play-Yan has. At the beginning of the staircase and at the end there is a warp icon. Running into this teleports you back to the other warp point, either at the end or beginning of your list. The warp addition helps perusing through long lists a little bit, but the system is designed for small lists. Having a huge list of MP3s in one folder would be a pain to navigate through.

 

On top of playing MP3’s Nintendo is releasing "Garage Games" on a weekly basis. These tiny downloadable titles are akin to classic Game and Watch handhelds. The first game Nintendo released is called Insect. In this game you control a ladybug and you have to climb up the screen on vines. The second game Nintendo released is called Bat. The goal of this game is to hit oncoming baseballs by pressing A at the right time. From what we’ve seen so far the Garage Games aren’t terrible entertaining. Worse of all these games are played in a window of the DS or GBA’s screen. Playing a dull game that’s hard to see just isn’t fun. It is likely that Nintendo added in Garage Games to compete with third party GBA movie players that have the emulate NES roms. Although, this hasty last minute add on to the Play-Yan doesn’t cut it.

 

I haven’t mentioned much about the Play-Yan’s selling feature, it’s MPEG4 playback. I did this for good reason because I haven’t been able to get it to work. The first problem is that the MediaStage software wouldn’t install on any of the computers we tried. Probably because the software is designed for a Japanese version of Windows XP. It appears to install fine, but the program immidietly crashes when you try to run it. If the Play-Yan could read any MPEG4 file this wouldn’t be a problem. As you know there are a bunch of different MPEG-4 video codecs including XVid and the popular Divx formats. However, the Play-Yan can’t play any of your standard MPEG-4 movies. Instead you have to re-encode them for handheld use.

 

Since we couldn’t utilize the Play-Yan’s packaged software we tried using good old TMPGenc. This exceptional tool allows you to encode video files in a variety of formats. If anything could be used to get around the Panasonic problem it would be this. So I tried three different MPEG-4 codecs in a variety of different resolutions. Unfortunatly, none of these files would play on the system. It looks like the only way to get video playback is to use the MediaStage software, which could be a problem for importers.

 

Compared to other third party movie players the Play-Yan is a tough sale. Some other players have all the features the Play-Yan offers on top of eBook support and NES emulation. Supposedly the Play-Yan can play higher resolution video files. The other advantage the Play-Yan has is the front side headphone port, which is great for GBA SP owners.

 

The real question though is do you need or want a media player for your handheld system? If you’re just going to use this to play MP3s there are smaller, sleeker and better MP3 players out there. If you want to play movies you’ll have to go through all the trouble to encode them first. The Play-Yan also requires that you purchase an SD card, which can run you an extra $40 or $50 depending on how much storage space you want on the card. Owners will also need to have or purchase a SD reader/writer to put files on the card for Play-Yan use. The package of purchasing all of these items is pricey just to play files on your DS. As a whole the Play-Yan is a cool toy, but the uphill battle to use it means only gadget lovers will get the most out of it.

 

Import Friendly? Literacy Level: 4

The MP3 and movie navigation supports English filenames and the menus are really easy to navigate through. We’ve already mentioned the problem with MediaStage, which will give importers headaches.

 

US Bound?

This item has limited distribution even in Japan, so a nationwide US release is unlikely unless Japanese sales are high.

 

+ Pros: Makes your Nintendo handheld a media hub with MP3 and MPEG4 support.

 

- Cons: MPEG4 support requires converting your video files or DVDs with Panasonic’s Media Stage software.

 

Overall: The Play-Yan does offer some neat features to the DS and GBA SP hardware, but the upgrade to do this is rather pricey. This device is really designed for technophiles.

 

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