Leapster Explorer: Play Theora Videos

This how-to will show you how to load your own Theora (Ogg Vorbis) video files on to the Leapster Explorer and play them from the standard User Interface.

Programs Needed
ffmpeg2theora

Winscp or similar client *ToDo add link to sshd how to*

7zip archiver or similar

Text Editor

Software Needed
Video file to convert, any thing ffmpeg2theora can handle.

The leaplet movie folder from Leapfrog

Under Windows
First you need to find a suitable video file, usual rules apply, better the source better the final video. Download ffmpeg2theora and save it in a directory.

Using your free leaplet card, download the movie available, as of this writing it was, Leapfrog's Letter Factory

Once downloaded you'll find it in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Leapfrog\LeapFrog Connect\LeapsterExplorer\LST3-0x001B000A-000000.lf2 extract the folder with 7zip or similar.

Go into the folder and delete LetterFactory320x240a2v7F12_AV.ogg that is the main movie file. You will be replacing it with the movie you create later. You can also modify the png logos if you want here, as they will be showing up in the Explorer UI and it will help you tell them apart if you load the Leapfrog movie on there. Be sure to save them as 8bit PNG. Next you're going to need to know a couple things about your video, open up VideoInfo.json in a text editor, changing VideoFile and AudioFile to the name of your soon to be theora video file, VideoTime is the number of seconds the video is, and framerate will be 12. Now open a command prompt and cd to the directory you saved ffmpeg2theora in. Copy and Paste your source video file to the same directory and run this command in the prompt. 12fps and 16000hz sample rate, seem to be the max before syncing issues occur. You could play around with this if you want.

ffmpeg2theora-02.7.exe -o output_file.ogg -F 12 -H 16000 input_file.ext

Once the file is finished encoding, copy the .ogg file to the /LST3-0x001B000A-000000 folder. You can rename the folder something easier to remember like /My_Video.

Open up your ssh program and navigate to /LF/Bulk/ProgramFiles on your Explorer. And upload your folder.

Now eject your Explorer, pull the usb cable out, and let it refresh to the main UI, you might have to scroll the screen over, but you should see your new movie file there. If all went well, you can tap on it, and it should start playing. Tap on the screen at any time to bring up the player controls, or hit the home button to exit out of it with a confirmation.

Under Linux
This guide already assumes you have set up your Leapster Explorer with SFTP access.

Download the Connect Movie App
We are going to use the Connect Movie App as the base for playing movies saving us from needing to use any leaplet codes. From your Linux desktop run the following command:

scp -r root@10.0.0.2:/LF/Bulk/ProgramFiles/ConnectMovieApp.

Scp will then download the files to your current working directory.

Encoding the video
ffmpeg2theora is included in most distribution repos so install using your distributions method.

Encoding the file is done with one line:

ffmpeg2theora -o output_video.ogg -F 12 -H 16000 -x 320 -y 240 input_video.avi

Editing the files
First thing to do is to open the ConnectMovieApp directory and inside the Video directory delete the ConnectMovie.ogg and LExplorer_ConnectMovie_Mix_V6.ogg place your newly encoded file in this directory.

Open the VideoInfo.json file and replace the ConnectMovie.ogg and LExplorer_ConnectMovie_Mix_V6.ogg lines with your new video filename.

Moving back to the parent directory you can edit the GameInfo.json with some infomation about your video rather then the default you could also use this time to edit the ConnectMovie001.png to something more meaningful.

You also need to update the md5sums for any file you changed, you can find the md5sum in Linux using this command:

md5sum /path/to/filename

Replace the new md5sums in the packagefiles.md5 file.

Rename the directory from ConnectMovieApp to something that means something.

Upload the movie
scp -r NewVid root@10.0.0.2:/LF/Bulk/ProgramFiles/

Unplug the USB cable and enjoy your new video.