A cranky video player for the Playdate

Playorama is a cranky video player for the Playdate. You can use the crank to fast forward and backward or move frame by frame through a video.

1. How to use

Warning: The process to get your own videos on the Playdate is a bit clunky. There’s a demo video included in the application if you’re not at ease with encoding video and audio.

1.1. Download and install

Download the latest release at https://github.com/hteumeuleu/playorama/releases .
Get the Playorama.pdx file.
Sideload it to your Playdate device. (You can refer to the official Sideloading Playdate games documentation.)

1.2. Controls

While a video is playing, you can use the following controls.

A: pause
B: menu
Up: toggle track bar
Left and Right: toggle through different playback speed
Crank: change playback speed up to 4x

If the video is paused, using Left and Right or the Crank will move frame by frame.

1.3. Options

Playorama has two options available in the Playdate System Menu:

VCR effect: adds a VCR pause effect to the video when going fast forward, backward or frame by frame.
Log: show errors that occured while opening your own video and audio files.

2. Add videos

Connect your Playdate to your computer in Data Disk mode.
In the main Data folder, locate or create the folder the app has access to. The folder shall be named either:
- com.hteumeuleu.playorama if you sideloaded the app over a USB connection,
- user.xxxx.playorama if you sideloaded the app through the Playdate website before february 2023 (where xxxx should be replaced by your user number used in other folder names),
- user.xxxx.com.hteumeuleu.playorama if you sideloaded the app through the Playdate website after february 2023 and Playdate OS update 1.12.
Add your video and audio files inside. Both files should have the same base name (for example: sample.pdv and sample.pda).

2.1. Sample videos

You can download the following videos to try it out.

(Coming soon!)

Download an archive and extract it in the application data folder (See 2. above.).

2.2. Encode your own videos

Using the online Playdate Video Encoder

Go to pdv.hteumeuleu.com.
Use the web app to encode your video. You will only get a .pdv file for the video.
Use another software like ffmpeg to export the audio as an .mp3.

Using 1bitvideo on macOS

Download 1bitvideo.app the video encoder made by Panic’s Dave Hayden: https://devforum.play.date/t/video-encoder-work-in-progress-mac-only/1390/23.
Use the app to encode your video. When done, you will get both a .pdv and a .m4a file. The Playdate can not read an .m4a from a data folder, so we need to encode the audio into .pda.
Encode the audio into MP3. The Playdate SDK documentation provides indication into how to do this using either Audacity or ffmpeg: https://sdk.play.date/1.11.1/Inside%20Playdate.html#f-sound.getSampleRate.

Using ffmpeg and a custom script

Crank Player has a bash script that relies on ffmpeg and a custom Python script to convert a video into a .pdv.

3. Source Code

You can compile the code with the following command:

pdc ./Source/ Playorama.pdx

hteumeuleu / playorama