MoonShell

MoonShell is a homebrew multimedia player for the Nintendo DS dual-screen handheld videogame system. It is one of the most well known pieces of Nintendo DS homebrew software, and as of December 2006, one of the few ways to play video on the DS.

The player supports DPG video files, MP3 / OGG / MOD / SPC / GBS / HES / NSF / XM / MIDI / low bit rate AAC audio / non-progressive JPEG / BMP / GIF / PNG images, and text files. MoonShell plays fullscreen videos at 20fps and widescreen videos at 24fps, with joint stereo sound at a samplerate of 32.768KHz. Both screens on the DS are used, with the bottom screen allowing file selection and control via touchscreen. The integrated plug-in system provides extensibility of program features. To add a feature, the plug-in files are simply copied to the appropriate folder. In order to function as a media player, several plug-in files are distributed with the software.

MoonShell is included as the default file manager for the commercial products SuperCard One, R4, CycloDS and M3 DS Simply Nintendo-DS flash system. The EZFlash V Flash Card has modified Moonshell source code.

The Moonshell package includes the Windows-based dpgtools video encoder dpgenc, and dpgplay (found within the DPGtools folder in the Moonshell folder containing the Setup.exe) for testing prior to installation on the DS. Encoding may be performed from most media formats, including DVD and Flash-based FLV. An alternative is the homebrew BatchDPG, which produces higher quality encoded video.