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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."
rejoice!
I have reported you to the authorities for reverse engineering this. Please remain at your location; the SWAT team is on the way.
But where are the people reverse engineering the EARLY kids' consoles, like the Socrates? I'm sure there are a few left in your collective attics...
The VideoNOW Linux Project can't be far behind.
I'm sure Hasbro will nip this in the bud as soon as they realize someone could market their own shows for it. (Or, god-forbid, porn!)
It's Slashdot's evil twin... SlashNOT
We found it in a tranquil time of computing, with many steps and columns
Then, in the absence of Abe Lincoln, we brought back a Speak N Spell
We have started a project to reverse engineer the format, and have made considerable progress. So far we have been sued for $10 million, and we are posting in hope of gaining even more attention to our work.
DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
okOne is never too careful nowadays...
it can even be operated by negroes.
"I'm sure Hasbro will nip this in the bud as soon as they realize someone could market their own shows for it. (Or, god-forbid, porn!)"
If they did that? Would it be kiddie-porn?
By buying units, and making certain the manufacturer knows we're buying them as a result of the project, thereby preventing a DMCA lawsuit that would only result in massive boycotting on our part.
On the other hand, it's easier to just sit and type about how much the DMCA sucks and how cool reverse engineering is.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
It is freakin grayscale for christsakes. Most people gave up on Black and White video somewhere around the Nixon Administration in the U.S.
Its cute and all, but go buy a portable DVD and go find a project where you are not going to run the risk of being sued into oblivion by the borg of Hasbro.
...when it's in color... 80x80 16 shads of grey LCD? C'mon!
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
...can I please suck some warm, salty piss out of your flaccid cock?
Thanks mate.
-- An AC in need
woohoo! 4-bit greyscale at 80x80. gives me flashbacks to storing pr0n on floppies...except this time it's motion pr0n!
Announcement: I have compiled all obligatory jokes in this post so you don't have to waste your precious time searching for them.
In Soviet Russia, a project to reverse engineer the format has starts YOU.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.
yes but deos it run linuks?
How much ghey pr0n fits on one disc?
Then, in the absence of Abe Lincoln, we brought back a Speak N Spell
I like the hack Bubs did when he made a Strong Bad robot out of a Grape Nuts box with a Speak N Spell
Join the TWIT army now!
For asking an army of slashdotters to go out and buy a pathetic video playback toy that at some point in the future may or may not be able to play home movies? Please!!
I guess the mods are desperate for good comments on this story!
After reading through the couple of updates they have, I get the impression that the format is actually a standard used somewhere but these guys just haven't figured out what it is.
They seem to be wasting their time grabbing frames and converting from jpegs etc. They should just try work out what the standard is. Afterall, why would the developers of the VideoNOW spend the time and money developing some new format when there are heaps out there already. They are already using a non-standard CD size to stop people just playing the discs on their own machines, and people wouldn't pay $8 for a few b/w low res cartoons to play on their own machines anyway. - so why use a propriety format?
I.O.U One Sig.
Right on, excellent point. The product was *just* released and at the rate the project is progressing, I expect that in a few weeks they'll be burning their own discs. At $50 a pop, it's a pretty cool & affordable project. A poster below points out that B & W was given up in the Nixon administration; however, I'm sure there's a colour one in the works.
10) Making prank "heavy breathing" phone calls
9) Sneaking up behind Star Destroyer crew members, covering their eyes, and demanding "Guess who?"
8) Practicing throwing Palpatine doll down pits
7) Genealogy
6) Using the force to learn to juggle
5) Mortal Kombat 5436
4) Using mind-reading ability to win at Battleship
3) Late nights with a pain droid
2) Sending anonymous love-notes to Mon Mothma
1) Checking Imperial Deli to see if they've named a sandwich after him yet
is a scary thing sometimes. I really can't get interested in hacking a gray scale video codec just for grins. The only possible use I can think of is that by reverse engineering the code you would be able to make 30 min. text documents available on the go. Kind of along the lines of e-books I guess. Might call them E-white papers.
I can watch better quality porn^H^H^H^Hvideos on my cellphone!
Jeez.
... so when someone comes up with that idea in the next 12 months you can sue them two years down the line and make your money.
:-)
Of course, set up a shell company with the sole purpose of exploting IP rights.
Why is it that when someone attempts to lock stuff they deem propritary so it won't get copied all over the place, so they can make a buck, someone has to come along to nullify it?
Instead of spending all your time trying to ruin someone's hard work, why don't you use your time and make something that *you* can sell? Hhhhmmmmm?
I hope you get sued and you go to jail.
Kevin
I know Color LCD's are more expensive.. But really.. Black and white in this day and age. The LCD is 80x80 already.. so the res is like insanly horrable. If it was color it might be mildly intresting, but as it stands it sucks.
I think we found our new outlawed ROT13.
_______
2B1ASK1
80x80 resultion with 16 shades of black...
I'd rather watch a 30 minute animated "buddy icon."
welcome our old convenience-joke overlord!
It's just video in the standard duh-duh format, replacing the right audio channel. It's uncompressed, and the screen is 80x80, so there's only so many combinations of fps, bit depth to choose from. I wouldn't call it a standard, it isn't really encoded at all. The bitmap data is just, kinda there, like PCM audio.
They don't list an extraction step, but I assume it's CDDA. The mysterious packets in the audio track "left channel" might be used to help that extraction process on a cheap playback device, or provide error correction information that would normally be present in a Yellow Book format.
I don't think there's any standard out there for cramming video in an audio channel in a strange packeting format with a hack to read timing information out of the other channel. These seem like very hardware-oriented, cost based design decisions.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
16 shade greyscale on an 80x80 pixel 4"x6" LCD? For fuck's sake, that's like watching video on a TI-8X calculator! (which, incidentally, you can do) Sure, it sounds like a fun project and all, but I don't think geeks will be rushing to encode their movies to this format so they can be played on this dinky little player. On the other hand, the player looks VERY portable and runs on 2 AA batteries. So I guess there is some potential for a low cost low resolution video/picture/text? viewer. It is interesting, at least.
It sounds to me like this little gadget is the modern implementation of a narrowband television. There are still guys who dink around with this stuff (indeed, I've started to assemble the parts for one myself), for fun you could try the Narrow Band Television Association website.
That being said, it seems like the format can't possibly be that difficult to determine. If the authors posted .wav files of some of the audio tracks, I suspect that an afternoon's worth of work by someone familiar with NBTV would crack the modulation wide open. After all, the box itself is obviously very cheap, it probably has very little CPU power, it can't be that
complicated.
It's a pity they don't use the normal mini-CDs, if they did I might buy one just for the novelty of being able to make my own CDs. I think they missed a bit of a hacker market by deliberately disabling this possibility.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
in the same way that a wart on the end of your nose would be.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
and that is right now 65k+ colors , by the time you figured it out my 2003 cellphone is going to seem old, oh and it cost me nothing (0$) with my talkplan
...there's still no cure for cancer
man, i would love to have that much free time.
Do you realize that by posting fake stories to slashdot, followed by fake discussions, you have in effect created a near-perfect simulacrum of the Slashdot you once destroyed?
So do you love slashdot and want it back? Do you miss Slashdot but have no idea how to create a real discussion with real, actual people?
I guess another way of putting it is, do you have any idea what the fuck you are doing?
it seems almost perfect for a slashdot crowd: "watch what you want, when you want, where you want? ... VideoNOW, the future of entertainment right in your hand."
Anyone want a small pr0n viewing device? I guess pr0n is pr0n, whether it be in B&W or in color.
a slut did tulsa
Oh my God! It's the new Pixelvision!
Actually, it's not. At least, not yet. Pixelvision was so great because it was liberating. It was the video version of the portable 4-track tape recorder. It brought the DIY/Garage ethos to movie making.
This thing is all about consuming licensed content ("Collect Them All") from the major media players, as if that's any big surprise. Sure, Zoc_All_Alone is reverse-engineering the file format, but until someone can hack a Mavica to record in that format, I don't think it will be as compelling to fiddle with.
In a related story, the IRS has recently ruled that the cost of Windows upgrades can NOT be deducted as a gambling loss.
"He also discovered a graphic format called PPM, where graphics are defined by hexadecimal, making shades of grey. "
....
WOT ??? Graphics defined by numbers ? I dont understand what this is getting at
Maybe they hope to make most of their profit off of the discs and not the player itself like w/ consoles and games?
http://www.mistersampo.com
Why would you want to reverse engineer this? Why for a case mod of course! Soon, you too will be buying a VideoNOW so you can gut it and put a small LCD in a drive bay that will show video.
Just think, you can download Lord of The Rings fron the net then the kids can crowd around and watch tiny screen.
"When I was your age, our TV was round and 3mm across. We had to ride a bicycle generator for 8 hours to watch 21 minutes of TV."
Seriously, it might make good modding material, but beyond that I think it is useless.
"Okay Johnny, see how daddy bypasses the cryptography algorithm on this special "Sing Along Volume 5" disc? This is what us grownups call 're-verse engine-neering'" ...
"But Daddy, why are you wearing an orange suit and sitting behind that glass?"
Oh yeah, there was all that encryption they broke and huge warnings on the screen when they inserted a disc.
I hope you just created that account to post this bullshit.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Ummmm.....
In Soviet Russia... They're blasting off, to the moooooon!!!!
(sorry.)
This seems to be a very dumb device, just displaying 15 pixmaps a second. The DMCA's anti-circumvention applies to encrypted or other anti-copying measures. If you have a data stream that's this blatantly out in the open, I would imagine that the DMCA need not apply.
mewyn
Come out with 8cm DVD-R media and a player I can hook up to my GBA and I'll buy it.
you could probably get better video on an Ipod
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.
With yellow eyes my green face my pink and white afro ...
I'm no toy kid your style is made by Hasbro
-Kool Keith, Real Raw
Will it run Linux?
Who doesn't like free music?
Imagine a Beo...nah!
Next: How to make movies on an Etch-a-Sketch by drawing each frame and then using a scanner to create individual GIF frames.
AT&ROFLMAO
I'm more interested in the innards of the device itself. What kind of "cpu" does it have? Maybe an Altera FPGA? What can this device be made to do? It's only 50$ can someone do something cool with it?
....I always wanted to hear a 'Speak and Spell' swear its face off.
The disks are specially encoded ~3 inch audio CDs
That must be some very special encoding of audio...which deserves the name "VideoNow"!
I swear that sounded funny a when I started typing...
Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these.....
As i understand they are using the second audio channel for video. So this is basically a ordinary audio cd with some strange things in the second channel. Why doesn't this hold 80 Minutes of video then?
It's not a full size Audio CD, it's a small sized one. Thus, 30 mins.
Reality check: maths time.
:-) Not Nintendo!
Screen resolution = 80 * 80 = 6400 pixels
Bits per pixel = 4
Bits per screen = 6400 * 4 = 25600
16 bit words per screen = 1600
16 bit words per second per channel of CD audio = 44100
Therefore, regular CD audio carries enough data for 44100/1600 = 441/16 = 27.5625 frames a second at this resolution. And TV only uses 25 frames a second. But this thing is reckoned to give 15 frames a second; hence there is plenty of spare space for timing information, insurance against lost bits from D-A-D conversion {they may be using a player head with only analogue outputs} and so forth.
Colour would need some form of compression, but this thing is capable of working uncompresed.
As long as there have been products on the market, people have been wanting to do things they were never designed for. Finding new uses is just a way of paying tribute to those products. Why did Hilary and Tensing climb Everest? Because it was there. They couldn't create a mountain of their own, but they could pay tribute to the mountain by climbing it.
For instance, someone actually turned the original GameBoy into a DSO. Now that was cool. Underneath it was still a GameBoy, so Nintendo still got their cut; they sold a GameBoy and maybe some games to someone who wouldn't otherwise have bought it. If anybody should have been worried by that stunt, Philips/Fluke and Tektronix should have been
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
This device represents something interesting that is worth investigating.
Not the software, which is apparently almost entirely absent, but the hardware concept.
Unbreakable, cheap, fairly compact video on near-to-disposable media. Let's drive this up a rev and see what will be possible in two or three years time with some modest improvements.
1. Most obviously, a larger and color display. Well, I guess OLEDs are the answer, since this is basically a toy which does not need years of lifespan.
2. Larger size, based on CDROM format. So we can use normal CDRs.
3. Basic video decoding so that the CD can hold a full movie. This should be possible in hardware, I'm sure chips or PGAs already exist for this.
That's it: layer the unbreakable OLED screen over the lid, simple circuitry to playback the video, and it should be possible to make $99 portable video players with very decent resolution and five-hour battery lives. And the whole thing should be simple enough for hobbyists to build.
This is a worthwhile goal. Certainly the device would sell millions.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
The specs sound really poor. I don't see what the fuss is about! 80x80 pixels 'quality picture' ...
I've made some 160x160 pixel movies (in color, using TealMovie) for my antique palm IIIc, and even that resolution, with four times as many pixels as the VideoNOW toy, was worthless for video.)
Fifty bucks for the basic VideoNOW unit seems pretty steep considering how little you actually get and how much they're gouging the kids for the content discs - 'collect them all!'
Judging from photographs of this unit, it's just a very basic (non-backlit) LCD screen with crappy contrast and slow refresh. Throw in awful resolution, 15fps and 8-bit sound technology from the 90s, there's just nothing in this worth much effort - the novelty value won't last long, and the actual content enjoyment will be nearly nil.
You might compare this with the antique PixelVision thing from Fisher-Price, which is pretty cool and has a sustained cult following even to this day, but I think mostly because it's a capture system with a unique 'lens' (plastic bubble with nil-to-infinite fixed 'focus' range) and very very strange image processing. Even that thing, 15 year old mostly analog toy, has much better resolution than the VideoNOW.
I dunno, maybe I'm just getting old, but this stuff doesn't seem very exciting to me. I can't imagine my 5-year-old nephew would be very impressed either, since he has one of those GBAs with bright backlit color screens.
At least it doesn't seem too heavily infected by DRM.
There are several in the works..
Just do a google..
My favorite is a treatment by a company called Geron. It targets cells that have excess amounts of telormerase. Pretty much only cancer cells have it (in adults), so the technique can treat almost any cancer, anywhere.
Its already in human trials.
80x80 pixels? ... quality display? .... must not burst in two laughing...
And how the fuck can they take up the 40MB or so with such a low quality image for 30 mins? I'd think they would be able to cram a good weeks worth of video on it...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Seriously, there's good reasons to want to reverse-engineer this thing, not least of all the fact that some geeks do, in fact, have children. It's nice to pay $5 for a single episode of SpongeBob or whatever, but wouldn't it be even better if we could encode the format on our own recordable mini-CDs? Why pay for SpongeBob episodes in crummy b&w format when you can download them from KaZaa... er, import them using a video card... and burn them on $0.25 CD-Rs?
I, for one, welcome our new stamp-sized-video-watching overlords.
I never had one of those, but my Dad would go to yard sales and brought home a circa 1955 equivalent which was marketed by Disney and had clips from the Mickey Mouse club and other short cartoons. This was much cooler IMHO.
While the goal of the project currently seems to be to play the kid's movies on a PC instead of the VIDEONOW, doing the reverse seems far more interesting to me. It seems to me that it'd be straightforward to take any video material (episodes of Friends, baby pictures, whatever you've got), reduce it to 80x80 grayscale, burn it to a CD, and play it back on your own little $50 player.
Maybe you could give them away at a trade show with it showing a little info video about your new product which the customer could walk while walking around. If they don't bring it back, who cares??
You could plant several of them around the city/campus and make some sort of mission-impossible scavenger hunt for your pal.
Whenever there's "cool hacked thing" story posted someone always asks the "what's the point" question. To you ask "where's your creativity?"
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
nothing beats 80x80 grayscale porn on the go!
fact: microsoft > linux
Shit. Now what will people use as a "Standard Bitch"?
No more "We can put a man on the moon, but we can't cure cancer"...
They couldn't create a mountain of their own, but they could pay tribute to the mountain by climbing it.
"Having just paid our respects to the highest mountain in the world, I then had no choice but to urinate on it."
- Sir Edmund Hillary in his autobiography "View from the Summit"
Also how about creating a SourceForge page for it?
This is an amazing summary of how the corporate world doesn't speak with customers, they speak at customers. Only someone stuck in a corporate mindset would think that missing functionality and vendor lock in was an amazing feature that customers want.
I understand that the product might not be financially viable without these limitations. My problem is that they brazens claim it's a feature. The only people to whom it is a feature is the company itself, certainly not end users.
Apparently Hasbro's idea of a "quality picture" doesn't quite match mine.
Limited quality kids versions of audio-visual devices aren't a new idea. Back in the 90s (I believe), there was a kids video camera that recorded black and white onto an ordinary audio cassette. There were also proprietary mini-media that held a single song. None of them did too well since the Real Thing kept dropping in price. They may be fun toys, but they seem too limited. This seems particularlly silly given its limitations, but whatever.
I wish the reverse engineering project the best of luck, it looks like a fun hack! And if you got a Videonow box for your kids, wouldn't it be neat to be able to make home-movie Videonow discs in addition to the ones for sale?
Search 2010 Gen Con events
You can also bypass the pharmaceutical monopoly altogether and order vitamin B17 (also known as Laetrile) or better yet, change your diet and get it from natural foods. Vitamin B17 also targets only cancer cells.
r g
In the land of the free, many people still go to Mexico to get these outlawed substances, with excellent results...though I will admit not perfect results.
You can also order it off the web. See www.vitaminb17.org (disclaimer: my web site)
Also, if I had cancer, Dr. Day's program, www.drday.com, would be at the top of my list of things to do.
Jay Banks
www.roadtowellsville.com
www.vitaminb17.o
Ron Paul
The "video encoded as audio track" got me thinking that what someone really needs to do is develop a Gameboy Advance cartridge with a stereo mini-plug jack that you can run from your cheapo portable CD player. Then, you could encode your video (as an audio stream) onto a standard CD-R, play it on your CD player, and display the video on your Gameboy.
Given that most kids who would be interested already have these two devices, you would just be looking at the price of the GB cart.
It'll never happen -- but it would be cool.
BTW, if you intentionally design a product that is easy to reverse engineer, can you be held liable for copyright infringement? I'm thinking of the Apex DVD players where the company left the firmware flashable and (probably) leaked the details to allow users to disable region checking and Macrovision. Therefore, you could buy a Macrovisionless, region free DVD player for $49 at Wal-Mart.
If a person were to design the above system and convince the powers that be that it came with a secure encoding method to burn the CD's, but then left enough hints that the free software folks could develop encoders for it, would the developers be accountable?
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
Rich
Go to www.quackwatch.org. Laetrile is thoroughly debunked there.
Yes, which explains why the people who go to Mexico LIVE...for the most part (nothing is 100%). Quackwatch is nothing but FUD and a front for the medical industry. When it comes to cancer, those who can think for themselves will survive, those who don't will become statistics.
usurper_ii
Ron Paul
You're forgetting the Fisher Price Pixelvision camera, which is still a cult classic. It recorded about 5 minutes of grainy black and white onto a 90-minute audio tape. You could get the things for cheap as hell back in the day and now they're extremely rare as they're wanted by film students and art snobs around the world. I kid you not. I once drove a fella around town while he made a short film on one of these things.
The pixelvision.
Linux: Free if your time is worthless.
Ask the family of Steve McQueen. Ask the other victims of you and all the other quacks who have been taken in by your garbage. It's true that much of what medicine does is barbaric, but it works a lot better than the crap the "alternative medicine" industry is pushing. True, it's nowhere near 100%, true it makes people horribly, horribly sick, but the statistics are on the side of the medical industry, not you liars. /connorbd, posting as AC
It is funny you mention Steve McQueen because actually Steve McQueen was healed of his cancer when he went to Mexico. He did not die from cancer, he died quiet some time after he came back to the US from complications from having his dead tumor removed FOR VANITY REASONS.
If you would actualy read what you wrote, it would be obvious to you how stupid it sounds. In the whole history of the world, no chronic degenerative disease, such as cancer, has been cured by giving someone a man-made poision. And you have the balls to call me a quack/liar? I have history on my side. All you have is a lot of sick and dead people and stats that PROVE what they are doing does not work...
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
Somebody send these poor bastards a hundred bucks. I would, but I am a student too...
Stick to your propaganda. Take your thirty pieces of silver and I hope you sleep well at night. Those who actually do cancer research for a living respect the hell that cancer survivors go through and know that there are no easy cures, and have to live with the possibility there may never be. You prey on others' uncertainties.