Is there gonna be a revival project for Nintendo Video?
I assume it would at some point. I don’t know a whole lot about Nintendo Video, but I assume Pretendo might work with some content creators for their videos to appear there? (like RiiConnect24 does with the Nintendo Channel afaik)
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That sounds like a cool idea. That service has been gone for years and I never used it due to getting a 3DS years after it shut down. I’d also like to see other dead-for-years 3DS services come back.
Nintendo Video uses a proprietary video format called moflex. There has been very little research done into this video format, for some reason, and only few tools exist for it. ffmpeg has the ability to convert videos from moflex to other formats if I remember correctly, but not the other way around. Every tool that exists, at the moment of writing, that can convert into a moflex relies on leaked SDK tools. Which is not something we wish to mess with. I’ve mentioned it internally before and @PN_quarky looked at it briefly, but it was a very low priority so we didn’t really do any real research into it.
If there becomes a legal way to create moflex videos, then we will absolutely supper this. But currently this is a huge legal concern for us, so we’re staying away from it.
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Hmm… is Nintendo Video an online service? If so, could it be possible to redirect the URLs that go to the Nintendo Video servers and replace them with URLs that go to our servers?
If we can do that, do we still need to worry about the moflex legal problems?
Nintendo Video is an online service. Which uses moflex videos. It expects all videos to be in the moflex format, regardless of where they come from. Which as mentioned, there is no way to legally create these files at the moment. The moflex video format would need to be reverse engineered first, then an encoder would need to be made
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Could we hire a team that could first research the moflex format first, and then reverse-engineer it?
Or, make a fork of the format when properly researched that’s compatible with Nintendo Video to overcome any legal challenge?
Hire a team? That’s completely unfeasible.
Pretendo needs developers who are knowledgeable with Nintendo systems and they can’t afford to hire people (I think they get $3500/month in donations and a large part of that is taxed/allows Jon to work full time on Pretendo).
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Doing that would require reverse-engineering the format, which is the entire difficulty in the first place. It’s certainly not impossible but it would require a lot of work and time.
There’s also not really any point in “forking” the format because, once you’ve cleanroom reverse-engineered it, you could legally encode the format.
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Something strange happened when I opened the Nintendo Video app on Pretendo. for some reason the friend list disconnects when you open the app and if you close it the friend list refuses to connect until you put the system in sleep mode.