VideoNow Player
A downloadable tool for Windows
This program is essentially a PC player for VideoNow discs. It has been tested with rips of the original black and white discs, color discs, and XP discs + regional variants.
The program supports opening standalone .WAV files ripped from the disc, a .cue file for a full CD rip, It also supports playing back discs from the drive but I only own one real disc I was able to test it with. I did test it with a burnt XP disc and it seemed to work fine. And yes, custom VideoNow crap seems to work as well, I don't know why it wouldn't. This is a 64-bit program and has only been tested on Windows 10. I don't know how to port it to Not-Windows OS™ nor do I know if 32 bit is good enough for the live decoding junk so please don't ask.
The green theme is based on the VideoNow Color FX player I own. It's a piece of shit that I think is starting to die because it struggles to read my Jimmy Neutron disc and no longer reads burnt discs but at least it looks cool. Custom themes coming at a later date. Yes, I know the GUI looks like shit. Eventually I want to make it look nicer and more mid 2000s-ish especially with custom button shapes.
This is possible thanks to the existing VideoNow disc decoding info posted by Marcos Del Sol Vives, saramibreak who created PVDTools, and VideoNowDude who originally documented the VideoNow Color crap over 20 years ago. Simple DirectMedia Layer is used for rendering. A fixed version of PVDTools source and its exe that properly decodes all 3 formats correctly, to my knowledge, is included. So yknow, the fixed decoding stuff is available for non player use.
The interactive side of the VideoNow XP discs plays back since its just the same video content but there is NO actual function to interact with them with the button prompts it asks for. I have no idea how the fuck they work so call it a WIP if even possible.
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Possible to-dos:
Custom themes
Interactive XP content buttons
Disc ripping wizard
Direct video conversion
Properly stop non VideoNow WAV files from being opened
Fix potential issues with BW decoding that might be caused by corrupted rips being read incorrectly
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THERE IS NO COPYRIGHTED CONTENT INCLUDED WITH THIS PROGRAM. YOU MUST SOURCE YOUR OWN VIDEONOW DISCS. AKA: Pls no sue
The VideoNow logo and branding is owned by Hasbro, SpongeBob SquarePants is owned by Nickelodeon, Clifford's Puppy Days is owned by Scholastic, and That's My Baby is owned by Animal Planet, which I am not associated a single fucking fraction with any of these entities pictured in the screenshots.
Download
Install instructions
Extract VideoNowPlayer-Release-WinX-64.zip and run the EXE. Make sure SDL2.dll is next to the EXE.
Comments
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Hello! I just wanted to say I'm shitting my fucking pants right now. Mad props to you dude for developing this. I don't care that the GUI isn't polished yet, I wasn't expecting anything at all when I Googled "videonow emulator" and got this. If anything, the amount of documentation that has been done by reverse engineers would naturally lead to this anyway, but I cannot thank you enough. That being said, I would like to state that I performed my own personal teardown of a non-working Color FX unit and took several pics of the ICs with my phone. The only thing worth noting is that the Color uses a custom Gigastorage SoC that I believe handles almost everything, including the video decoding. As far as I can tell, there's no documentation about the hardware specs anywhere, so I thought you'd find that interesting. The XP is a different beast, but I assume it uses a revised chipset to properly interpret the interactive tracks. I know you haven't figured out the XP interactive logic yet, but there's no rush at all since I think the XP's interactivity layer is still largely unknown, even though the "interactivity" is literally just jumping between tracks.
Your dying Color FX also highlights how valuable this project is as a preservation tool. Working Color/Color FX units are becoming increasingly scarce on eBay. There are literally no working XP listings, and fully working Jr listings are few and far between (unsurprising, given how toddlers treated those things). The build quality of the laser mechanisms wasn’t exactly very high for a children’s toy from the early 2000s, so yeah, it’s bound to fail at some point. Also, does the laser mechanism on your unit make a really high pitched noise when reading the TOC during booting? I did a stress test on my Color unit, and the laser seems to make a higher pitched noise during continuous use with very short cooldown periods, implying some sort of thermal stress. Your unit definitely has to be working harder than normal after years of usage.
And yes, you could manually rip a PVD with PVDTools and do all the manual conversion/assembly shit with Irfanview and VirtualDub, but the average person doesn’t want to do all that. Oh yeah, and PVDTools just doesn’t work for me anymore. It did once, and now it wont give me any frames. This was after I made sure I ensured the correct file path for the disc images. I know I’m just glazing you to death, but you do not understand how long I’ve wanted this.
Hope you found my rambling insightful, you fucking mad lad:D
Oh my god this is probably the sweetest commment ive gotten on anything ever 😥
Yes i still only have the one real bw disc but i think theres a quiet high piched whine while the disc spins. At this current point, sure my disc has some small fairly deep scratched that dont affect anything until the end of the disc, the fact that it attempts to read for a minute and then fails speaks volumes I guess lol
Also mind you i got this green FX from ebay around like early 2022. Back then it read the BW disc and even a burnt test disc and its been sitting unused most of the time. So lowkey the unit is just dying. My BW disc came from a unit from the thrift store which didnt spin the disc at all which prompted me to buy an FX from ebay
Also, would you be okay if I upload your app to Archive.org? I’d obviously credit you for it, but I’d do it in order to have it gain more attention. Because of you, no one needs the actual hardware anymore for playing PVDs, and that’s a huge accomplishment in my book. If not, that’s totally cool, I know you’re still refining the GUI.
yeah honestly I don't mind lol I haven't really touched it in ages because i've been busy with other stuff.
is This Really a VideoNow Emulator?, that's cool!!!
Emulator is a funny word but I wouldn't necessarily say that. It's technically a media format just encoded strangely on CDs so think of it like like if all DVD players suddenly vanished but a few sources still had decoding info about the format and someone had to make a dvd player program
i see