Can it output the audio as well? I tried it but no audio.
I used this to create a the pdv and pda files but they crash the playorama app when I try to load it with them installed. The pdv created by the web version is twice as big, and has no audio but it loads and runs fine. Any ideas?
Oh no. Do you have any error you could share when Playorama crashes?
It was my newby error. The default resolution on the app (256x144) was not right for the PlayDate. I initially ran it without changing any settings. Once I figured out the resolution was wrong everything worked great.
Well thank you for this! That is indeed an edge case I didn't take into account. (Especially since 1bitvideo.app didn't allow for different video sizes initially so I didn't even think about this.) I just pushed a fix to Playorama for this: Release v1.0.1 · hteumeuleu/playorama · GitHub
woo yeah, but please add pdv to dev docs as well
Is there any chance there could be an online conversion tool or simple command line/program for pc? I'm admittedly no coder but I would love to have all the homestarrunner episodes on my playdate but quite frankly have no clue how to work this sort of coder end stuff, I'm an art guy haha
ICYMI above @hteumeuleu made an online encoder: https://pdv.hteumeuleu.com
A while back I started converting the core to a command-line tool that platform-specific applications could put a UI around.. I hope to get back to that some day, though there's plenty of higher priority stuff on my plate right now. 
Yeah understandable, I appreciate the response! Hope someday we get that fabled video converter program haha
Can you explain to me the difference between Stuki, Atkinson, Sierra, Sierra Lite and so on? What's the most ideal format? and what's the smallest size? I am running into two issues as well.
I am trying to convert a movie I produced to PDV, but the original size is 69mb MP4, compressed. Yet it exports as PDV at 212MB. Why is that?
Problem 2: Audio format to PVA doesn't seem to translate well to the playdate. There's alot of base in the project so I tried to minimize that but the audio comes out unreasonably static-like. What's a viable format for audio before converting to PVA?
Wikipedia has a great comparison of what each algorithm produces:
Sadly there is no real ideal format, you have to try and see which one fits your video better.
Thank you for this! I found myself somewhere stuck between Atkinson and Stuki, on one hand I like the Clariry of Stuki, but on the other I like the harsher contrast between shadows in Atkinson
I saw the online encoder, but was progress ever made on a Windows version of the 1bitvideo application?
I also am interested in a windows version.
Another thing that I have a question about is just simply playing a .pdv file after encoding it. Do I have to load it onto the Playdate just to see it? Or is there a .pdv emulator or codec?
Is video playback at a resolution other than 400,240 supported in the playdate SDK?
I'm getting glitches when trying to do that with my own converted videos, and I'm not sure if it's due to the way I'm converting to pdv or the runtime that's causing problems.
I'm on Windows so I can't test 1bitvideo unfortunately. Are you planning on publishing the source? It could be very useful for the community to be able to see an official implementation for video conversion.
Ok, I finally got videos working with different resolutions.
For anyone hitting the same issue, one caveat is that your video width has to be a multiple of 8, probably because internally the 8-bit chunks containing video data can't contain data for two different lines.
It would be great to fix it (or error out) so it doesn't silently cause glitches, but at least I have a workaround now.
2 years later, VLC doesn't play pdv files yet. The latest version 3.0.21 seems to be compiled in june 2024. Any way to know when this is expected to land in VLC?
Love what you have made, I don't have a playdate but love video experimentation, is there a way for me to convert my file back from a pdv to a file playable on another device?
actually I did it with FFmpeg lets go
is there opportunity for an apple silicon build of the mac app in the future @dave? wanna make sure i can keep using it after apple drops the compatibility layer for intel apps next year.