VideoNOW PVD Reverse Engineering

Zoc_All_Alone writes "In mid-July, Hasbro released the VideoNOW, a portable media player for kids. The disks are specially encoded ~3 inch audio CDs. We have started a project to reverse engineer the format, and have made considerable progress. More information about the player can be found at the Hasbro website."

Re:let's support them

[stratjakt]

like any other console, they plan to make revenue selling hillary duff songs for it and that sort of shit.

I'm sure they just wont care. This hack is of interest to about a dozen people worldwide, and I doubt there will be a big 0-day-videomanZ scene.

MS and Sony dont make too big of a deal over modding, and they have something to lose.

Re:DMCA VIOLATION

[Nova1313]

yeah really it's sad but anything that mentions reverse engineering anymore gets a comment like this. It's not a bad comment the problem is that it's so true. Everyone is sue happy.

Feature?

[RedWizzard]

From the Hasbro site:

VIDEONOW discs feature a special proprietary format and will not fit into or play on other media players.

How is it a feature that their discs won't play anywhere else?

Re:+5 Interesting??

[reiggin]

You, yourself, have obviously never been asked to mod. Or else you'd know that one of the requirements for modding is that you 1) ingest large amounts of beer, and that you 2) do some random acts of moddness just to throw off the community and/or see if they are paying attention.

Re:standard formats

[stratjakt]

A standard. It sure is!

Its called the "bunch of grayscale bitmaps one after another" standard. Audio in one channel, video in the other. Pretty much the most obvious way any reasonable designer would put it together.

The VideoNOW itself has no ability to decompress video or do anything fancy. Just load a pixmap into an 80x80 register array 15 times a second. I'm not the least bit shocked the bitmaps are already 80x80 hex arrays, ready to go.

Its unlikely Hasbro was ever concerned about someone hacking a goofy little kids toy that'll cost 20 bucks come christmas time.

Re:One Question;

[Crash6-24]

Why? Because it's there! Every product has some mystery (or proprietary stuff) that someone just has to explore. These guys are probably engineers in real life.

Re:Why?

[Wumpus]

It's just the CueCat all over again. Someone has a dumb idea (give away the scanner, sell the links), and then the entire world is just expected to sit there nodding and saying how smart this is.

Figuring out how stuff works isn't malicious. Neither is finding new uses for your property.

I doubt that the target audience for this is going to go wild burning their video collection on this thing. If Hasbro's content is unique enough and cheap enough, it'll sell. If it isn't, and people don't want it, it won't sell, reverse engineering or no reverse engineering.

Re:Why?

[Nihilanth]

here's an alternate way of looking at it:

a company is only going to make a product as useful as they have to to charge you as much as they can get away with. Lots of math is involved. Board meetings. Statistical analysis. This is the reason everything costs too much and sucks.

Now, lots of people out there devote their time and energy to making the things people paid way to much for work better. Whats wrong with that?

Re:Why?

[evilviper]

If I have a recorded television show (time-shifted, if you will), why shouldn't I be able to put it on the appropriate media and watch it on the bus with this little thingamajig?

Why? Maybe because it's extremely low-res, black and white, and nearly as expensive as small, portable, DVD-players will be in a short while. Plus, DVDs (or VCDs/SVCDs) are easy to make.

Why would you *want* to do anything with this?

At one time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Many years ago when a manufacturer said "proprietary", it was a good thing, because it implied they had a secret invention.

Its kind of how "discriminate" used to be a good thing, but now itw not.