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Playing video on an 8-bit microcontroller

The LCD displays for Nokia phones have seen a ton of use as easily interfaced displays for Arduino or other microcontroller projects. Usually, these LCDs are only used for displaying a few lines of text, or if someone is feeling really fancy, a small graph. Shame, then that we don’t see more complicated and computationally difficult tasks like playing video very often. [Vinod] sent us his way of playing video on these small color screens, surprisingly using only an ATMega32 microprocessor.
The build started off by saving uncompressed image data on an SD card using code from a previous project. [Vinod] was able to write a slideshow program to go through the SD card one file at a time and displaying each image. From there, it was simply a matter of using a Python script to convert frames of an .AVI video file to an uncompressed image and display them at 15 frames/second.
Turning these videos into talkies was a bit of a problem, but after taking an uncompressed .WAV file and sending that to a PWM pin on the ATMega, [Vinod] managed to play sound alongside his video.
The result is the ability to play a video with sound at 15 frames a second and a 132 x 65 resolution. You can check out the demo video after the break.
Filed under: Microcontrollers, video hacks