I’d love to see Pretendo bring back or at least try to bring back some “lost media” especially with how much spot pass data you all have.
Is there any plans of doing this?
Yeah this would be cool. They could even put custom stuff on it that they make or public domain movies!
I’ve had to edit your post quite a bit, hope you don’t mind!
We don’t have any plans for anything related to Nintendo Video and in order to support that, we would have to reverse engineer the Mobiflex format. I think we’d probably only be able to host content from the community if we were to support it anyways.
Update: I’ve been able to work out how nintendo video loads videos from the server, and been able to create an automated converter that converts from mp4 to moflex. Expect a revival coming soon!
I’ve been able to play hello world by louie zong
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To be clear, the way the app works has been known for a while. The stop gap has been the creation of the moflex videos. Very limited research has been put into the format over the years, instead people opt to use leaked SDK tools to create them. The reason why we haven’t done anything with apps that require moflex videos is because of a lack of legal, clean room, tools/research to create moflex videos. We legally cannot use the leaked SDK tools nor can we support projects using them, and if you’re using them then we will have to remove this post
There have been a handful of attempts to do this in a legal way in the past, but none have ever been fully completed. There does exist a demuxer for moflex in ffmpeg (FFmpeg: libavformat/moflex.c Source File) but it can only convert from moflex, not to moflex
If you’ve completed the missing research needed to create moflex files without using the leaked SDK tools, we’d love to see it published. But if you’re using the SDK tools, we ask that you not talk about it here
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I actually downloaded existing moflex files, then reverse engineered the format (using an existing non finished converter) and managed to find a way to legally convert them.
May take a while because I need to make sure it works for every video and I’m planning on making a simple web interface to convert them, but it will eventually be open sourced
So yes, I have found a completely legal way!
If you’ve managed to complete the missing research, clean-room without the SDK, then that’s pretty big news. Regardless of whether or not your code is open source/complete or not, it would be great to see this properly documented on https://3dbrew.org
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I’m gonna make a blog post about how it works on my website soon, I’ll send a link when it’s done. I’ll then finish up my converter and put it on GitHub
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Just to 100% confirm here, no SDK tools/source code leaks/etc. are involved here? Not even in the research process? Like, even if your code doesn’t use the SDK tools directly, you didn’t even use the SDK tools or any other leaks as a reference or reverse engineer said tools? I just wanted to confirm that no SDK tools, source code leaks, etc. were involved, and that it was all cleanly done via methods like game decomps?
Sorry to ask, I’m just a little shocked at the claim since the 3DS scene has tried and failed to do this several times over the years, to the point of just giving up and using the leaked tools instead. Especially since the message came less than 24 hours after your last reply, which is extremely fast. I hope you can understand the skepticism, it’s nothing personal and I obviously want to be wrong, it’s just a bit shocking is all so I wanted to confirm
Ahh, I did do some reverse engineering on the SDK, just to look at how it encoded the video, but then I reimplemented it with no original code from the sdk (and I used a different language), and it’s not programmed remotely similarly to the actual SDK. I did also take some code from a more premature implementation and used that to start (I’ll credit the one I used in the blog post and repo)
In that case, discussion of the project isn’t permitted here and I would like to retract my request for you to document things on 3dbrew. Please do not do so, as that’s largely considered not clean-room since SDK tools were involved. The use of a different language and lack of SDK code don’t really matter here, since the leaked SDK tools were still used as a reference
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So should I delete my existing implementation and try again without looking at any existing tools or am I cooked
That’s up to you, I don’t control what you do with your own projects or in your personal time nor am I interested in even trying to. The only thing I’m interested in doing is making sure our rules here are followed, and trying to keep public documentation clean. Your projects aren’t something I police, they aren’t my concern. Though I will say that you’re probably “cooked” in the sense that now that you’ve used the SDK as reference, I wouldn’t feel comfortable touching anything you’ve made/documented with relation to moflex. We typically refer to this as “SDK taint”, where now that you’ve seen/referenced it once you can’t really undo that so anything you make in the future with relation to what you’ve seen/referenced could be considered not clean
Damn just reading these posts makes me feel both dumber and the need to learn what you are talking about to understand is that good?
It’s nerdier lawyer talk for saying Papa Nintendo can and will get involved. Especially with the reference to using tools that essentially were under NDA getting leaked out from under that.
As it was saying if you happen to reverse engineer what is needed to make this function, you can prove that it was done in a manner that does not infringe on anything that was supposed to stop you from getting access to it.
You are no longer able to float down the river of the grey area allowing you to publish an open source method if it is KNOWN you ever had access to tools that got you there, that were legally not supposed to have known about or seen.
Since it was known you saw it. You can’t ever unsee it, and any subsequent work done is tainted. Thus you CANNOT be associated with anything to do with any work tracing back.
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Ohhhhh Riiiiiiiiight…
(naw I totally understand)