I've been excited by the Playdate the minute I saw the first trailer. So when Panic started to tease about the upcoming SDK, I knew I wanted to try to code something for it. But I didn’t have any idea for a game… The Playdate SDK has functions to play videos. So I started to wonder: wouldn't the Playdate be a great device to watch movies on? Of course not! But wouldn't it be kind of silly and fun? Of course yes!

And I built a first prototype to play a single video (the trailer of a movie that is kind of about going forwards or backwards in time… can you guess what it is?). And it was fun indeed. Humans high pitched voices played accelerated are never going to be not funny to me. And so I started my journey to build a video player for the Playdate.

And here it is! Playorama is a cranky video player for the Playdate. You can sideload your own videos by hooking your Playdate to your computer in Data Disk Mode. And then you can play your videos! Or should I say play with your videos? Use the crank to fast forward or backward. Or hit pause with the A button and starting moving frame by frame with the crank. Yay! Fun!

But first you're going to have to encode your videos in a specific format. And let's be honest, this is also very fun… if you're the sort of person who likes to read ffmpeg documentation or learn about binary buffer reading, little-endians and whatnot. But I understand this might not be your case. So half-way through the project, I went on a secondary side-project to create an online Playdate Video Encoder. It's a bit slow and only outputs video for now, but it gets the job done.

I hope you'll enjoy it! And tell me… what are you going to watch first?