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VideoNOW PVD Reverse Engineering

Posted by simoniker on from the kiddie-player-reversioning-shenanigans dept.

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."

3 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Re:DMCA VIOLATION by Nova1313 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  2. Feature? by RedWizzard · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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?
  3. Re:standard formats by stratjakt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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