I remember ‘Video Now’ very clearly. I wanted one, and almost got one for my birthday WAY BACK WHEN, but when my father saw the quality of the video itself instore, HE INSTANTLY said ‘HELL NO! im NOT spending my hard earned money on THAT, no way! Pick something else out.’ He would instead buy me a sizable stack of new gba games. Later that year, at christmas, he bought my siblings and i a PROPER portable DVD player to use on long car rides. Can’t say anyone regrets these choices.
I like bad video. One of my favorite things is to go to thrift stores and buy recorded blank vhs tapes. You get some awesome commercials from time past as well as some cool home movies sometimes. Or weird obscure movies abd shows. I like when it’s warped or also when it is very tiny. I had some movies on gameboy advanced and it was also bad but good bad lol
I had a Shrek/Shark Tale double feature for Game Boy Advance. Both movies, full, on one cartridge. Absolute game-changer that you could never replicate with an iPhone.
@@soyoltoiIt felt magical because at the time it almost literally was. It was a technological stunt and marvel at the time. Video on a gameboy during the early 2000s was magical. Video on a phone during the early 00s was magical. All of that and more on a PSP in 2004... it was high end cutting edge technology.
As someone who had the original model as a kid and loved it, I can tell you the one you got was not faulty. It would frequently skip -- I would make it skip just for fun -- the glare was constant, the compression was outrageous, and the screen and image quality was laughable. Yet, I still thought it was the coolest thing ever.
Exactly my experience. I watched the same disks over and over despite our family having portable DVD players, and plenty of DVDs. It was just a fun device.
Summed up my feelings perfectly. Everything about it was crappy. But I was watching SpongeBob in the car so I was happy! As a kid you don't know any better!
I was in the target demographic for the VideoNow when it was released - and used it plenty on car rides with friends, etc - but I never ended up owning one. My family was instead persuaded into buying a portable DVD player at just around the same time - 2004-ish. The VideoNow color at $75 + limited discs was a REALLY hard sell at a time when house-brand portable DVD players complete with lithium rechargeable batteries were under the $100 mark and usually featured bigger, brighter, clearer, higher-resolution screens. I agree with Mat's assessment at the end - don't let me ruin your fond memories!! But the tech here just wasn't impressive for the cost.
it made sense why they did what they did. It was built to a price point and they knew the audience they were targeting: 4-13 year olds. 4 to 13 year olds aren't really gonna care that much about the quality of the screen because the novelty of it would've been impressive. That being said these days for about the same price even with inflation you can buy a tablet with a far more impressive screen. It's really a testament to how some things have gotten better for less or about the same. It also has to be said about the portability of those "portable" dvd players. They were larger and better, yes. But I think for some they just liked that it was simple and worked, at least a parent's perspective.
I was immediately wondering why anyone would buy one of these when portable DVD players were around at the time. In 2004 I got my first laptop for £50 from ebay, after a pretty cheap hard drive upgrade it did me for portable media for a few years.
Same we got a zenith portable DVD player 9 inch color lcd, also had video input. This was circa 2005 2006. Lots of my friends had portable players. We swap dvds of our favorite anime shows
@@Milamberinx I was wondering the same. I guess the only draw would be the titles? Seems like they heavily leaned into the Nickelodeon tie-in, and maybe those titles wouldn't have been available on DVD at the time? It's interesting how we've become so accustomed to having EVERYTHING available streaming, that's it's difficult to imagine how novel having TV shows on a portable device would probably have been.
By then minivans offered an LCD screen that folds down from a console attached to the ceiling behind the driver and front passenger seats for the kids to watch videos.
When I was in middle school, this was one of the first devices I remember causing mass skepticism about advertising. At first everyone wanted one. A few kids got them, brought them to school, and it became clear that it was a glorified audio player with only 1-2 cartoons per disc. Within months there was a complete 180 where having one on the schoolyard got you made fun of and they disappeared from sight. The color one came out, but by then the name had been dragged through the mud and nobody wanted to be associated with them. Then portable DVD players came down in price and the GBA titles were released, and just like that it was a relic.
I'm a bit too old for the GBA video titles. I was busy with college at the time and never saw any of them, though I do own several GBA games still. The video cartridges look better than I expected.
@@deusexaethera Those GBA video titles were just about watchable on the small, sometimes not even backlit GBA screens. They were incompatible with the Gamecube GBA player for a reason. I was also too old for those, but my younger siblings had them.
this is more or less what I remember about this. I remember wanting one at first, and fawning over one, but one lackluster GBA video title for christmas and a portable DVD player the year after basically made all of the child targeted media devices obsolete to me. Even my hand-me-down dreamcast could play CDs well enough that I didn't NEED a poorly made anachronism of a walkman, and just a couple years later there would be streaming services and media files that further obsoleted any attempt to sell me a proprietary format. I'm still a bit of a physical media nut but the sheer amount of proprietary collectibles marketed to me as a child hasn't made me exactly adopt bluray over video files and streaming because it's relatively restrictive and not a generalized portable format across devices like other previous physical media.
I never even heard of these things until now. When I was a kid the schoolyard was just Gameboy advance and PSPs. Although I feel I didn't miss out on much
I remember my older brother having one of these when I was little and I was *beyond* jealous! You can watch cartoons without having to watch through commercials! AND he could watch TV *in the car*? Mindblowing. We were truly living in the future.
I had one of these as a kid and I actually loved it! Despite being comparatively crappy, as a young kid in the early 2000s there was a level of freedom or excitement involved with having a personal video player. Nothing else like it really existed at the time, at least for a broke kid like myself.
I wholeheartedly agree. Being a lower middle class 8 year old it was definitely a step up from reading maps and street signs to being able to watch an episode of my favorite show on the go
I had a 486 with an Hauppauge WinTV. Did not watch a lot of TV with that setup but it taught me to program. Parents did their kids absolutely no favor by buying these toys.
I remember seeing adds for these as a kid and thinking "that's a worse DVD player", not because of the quality, but because of the time limit. When buying discs was rare, cramming 4+ hours of video on a disc was a big plus.
lol when I was like 13 I asked for the grownup version of this thing, a real dvd player from sears for christmas, unfortunately we got two faulty units that had to be returned, "builtin bateries wouldn't hold the charge" so yeah that kinda sucked. Damn I wish I remembered the brand and model so that I could find a similar one on ebay just for the nostalgia, hopefully one that still works. It was round, had a flipout kickstand, played dvd and MP3s, came with a set of foldup on-ear stereo headphones and a black canvas case. Unit had a 3inch color TFT screen I believe it even had a micro sd card slot on the side for mp3 files. Year was 2006 I wound up getting a squared off version of the same machine from radioshack instead, I still have that one, same idea only it is square not round. It also stopped reading discs after a year of owning it lol but I kept it for whatever reason.
i seem to remember portable DVD players being more expensive but, maybe that's because we never actually shopped around then. (early to mid 2000s) i though portable DVDs players were well over $100 and DVD costs probably tad higher than. i guess a worse product for less money lol
For a second I was giving this product a break thinking it was some 90's toy. Then you pulled out the gameboy micro and that instantly aged it into just being a terrible product.
When I was in 6th Grade (2006), they were really popular in school especially when it came to riding the bus & at lunch time but I was smart enough to not want one so I just took my Dad’s very expensive (at the time) portable DVD player (without permission) & watched actual full movies.
People forget that the portable DVD players were a *big* ticket item when they first came out. $1200+. And they sold fairly well, even at that price! Also stunning to see how fast the prices dropped in the iPhone era, halving every year thereafter, now a < $50 item.
I had the color version as a kid. You're spot on about the video quality, it was awful. But the appeal was not the quality of the video, just the fact you could watch them portably at a price your parents were willing to pay. They also had *NO* DRM, which is really shocking considering the price of the unit and the PVDs, especially when Viacom was the content owner on many of them. I ended up inadvertantly creating a VideoNow piracy ring at my elementary school. All I had to do was rip the PVDs in my cheap Windows XP eMachine, burn them to a CD-R, and then use scissors to cut the discs to size and sanded the sharp edges as much as I could. Eventually somehow I was able to get access to the teacher's paper cutter, for more neat disc cuts. Any money that Viacom lost, ended up going to the Band-Aid corp, because we frequently had cuts on my fingers from the rough edges of the discs. While it was a really crappy product, it did introduce me to hardware hacking.
I suppose they may have thought that using non standard disc sizes would be DRM enough, and that by controlling the 8.5 and 10.7 cm disc supply they would get all the money on pirate copies. But even so I am surprised. This was the age of the Sony rootkit scandal, in which attempting to listen to Natasha Bedingfield caterwauling "theeeese words are my own" or Satyricon grinding out Volcano risked filling your PC with malware.
@@MrDemonsushiGuy So, CD-R's will pretty visibly indicate where the data is burned (starts in the center), most of the time the VideoNow images only took up about 2/3 of the disc (and even less for the B&W version), if you cut it properly, avoiding the sections that are burned with data -- you'll get a disc that should fit in the VideoNow. It's been well over 15 years since i've made a ghetto PVD, some memories are blurry. Your results may vary :)
It appears that they couldn't afford DRM. From what it looks like, they took the raw pixel values and packed it into Audio CD data. No compression. Likely what they did was buy a dirt-cheap audio CD mechanism, take the digital audio output and pipe it into a display. DRM/encryption/authentication that couldn't be easily copied would require much more hardware.
It's really just a cost thing. PDAs of the time were as capable but they were 10 to 20 times more expensive. Smartphones became so cheap today that everything else makes no sense.
The only major advancement most smartphones have made in the last ten years that makes them far superior is storage space. Around 2004, I remember mp3 players having a gigabyte of storage was good. Today, one gigabyte would only hold a single, standard definition movie. Most of the other improvements of smartphones are dependent on external changes, such as mobile date speeds improving, and apps or websites being optimized for phones.
Saying that, my Sony Ericsson S700 could do a nicer colour screen, and I could fit the entire Shrek movie on the things memory stick. I'd totally forgot I had that phone, but it was amazing! A bit more pricey than these players though, and you'd have to do your own yargh converting.
@@jackdough8164 The thing with PDAs was, they were expandable. You could get a GPS module which had it's own Microchip which did it's job. I had a PCMCIA jacket on my 2000 released iPAQ and it allowed me to install a WiFi card and a CF card for storage. There were cell-modules availabe. That made them even for their age quite more capable than todays totally sealed smartphone which rely on software support for everything. And yes the Dell Axim X50v I dreamed about came before the iPhone and had a higher resolution display (before retina half a century later).
I had one of these as a kid and I can tell you that I didn't notice any of the short comings of the design because I was young. Around that same time I was listening to CDs on a portable CD player which would also skip at the slightest bump so that wasn't anything out of the ordinary from my experience. I was just happy that I could watch SpongeBob in the backseat of my car while my parents ran errands. As an adult that now knows about video and audio quality, yeah this thing is terrible. I don't think it was meant for adults though. I think this was meant for kids that wouldn't notice that kind of stuff and indeed I didn't. It existed in a time frame where portable video players were new enough for it to be novel but just barely mature enough that only adults with experience would be able to notice the flaws.
My son now watches really bad resolution shows from 30-40yrs ago right after watching 4k content and doesn't ever comment that they look bad. While I think "man I cant believe we used to watch such low quality stuff"
Agreed. I had one as a kid that I loved. I think I only ever had 2-3 discs for it, and I watched them excessively. I have no memory of it being THAT tiny or THAT pixelated. Heck I barely remembered that it was only black and white. I just remember how much I loved it and how much use I got out of it. It felt super cool at the time. Honestly kinda shocked watching this and realizing just how poor quality it actually was. But, I'd say I easily got my parent's money's worth out of it.
Wow, it is almost impressing how they messed up the storage efficiency: 315MB for 25 mins equals to a bitrate of about 1,68 MBit for video and audio. Nowadays, we can easily decode a 720p video with stereo sound to fit into this bitrate and it looks good! Their 80x80px, 4bit colordepth with 15 frames format will take 409KBit when it is UNCOMPRESSED, so you still have 1,27 MBit left. And even if they put the mono audio uncompressed on that disc at 0,77 MBit (that is 44khz CD quailty!), they still have 0,5 MBit left for whatever. So yeah, in terms of data efficiency, they failed completely.
Yeah, even back then one could fit a feature length movie on a CD at a much higher resolution than that screen. Hell, they could've put those videos in friggin' Adobe Flash format and still come out ahead of what they pulled off.
To be fair to the VideoNow, it was made to be cheap; which meant using older and simpler video encoding (eg MPEG-1). Using a more modern codec like MP4/Divx would make it too expensive for a kids toy.
True, but efficient codec hardware is expensive- the #1 priority here was obviously keeping it very cheap. I'm 99% certain that the mono VideoNow is little more than a portable *audio* CD player design that's been cheaply adapted with minimal supporting hardware that does little more than buffer and feed the near-raw bitstream from one of the two channels to the LCD (one 16-bit sample = 4 x 4-bit pixels). My own quick-n'-dirty calculations confirm that 80 x 80 at 15fps would take 48,000 bytes/sec (*1) without *any* compression. Even allowing for overheads, that's comfortably within the bitrate of 88,200 bytes/sec required for a single channel of CD audio. (*1) 80 * 80 * 15fps = 96,000 pixels/sec. 4-bit greyscale means 2 pixels per byte, so 48,000 bytes/sec are needed.
@@Yeen125 I doubt that the original mono VideoNow even uses MPEG-1 or *any* compression. It's obviously based on audio CD hardware, and there's enough bandwidth within a single channel to get 4-bit (16-level) 80 x 80 video at 15fps uncompressed. (Obviously that's not very efficient, but I'm guessing it meant you could essentially take the digital bitstream from one of the two "audio" channels and feed it almost directly to the LCD with only very simple buffering and support hardware needed).
@@NotATube "Good codecs are expense" sure, but passable codecs aren't, as indicated by the DVD ripper software available at the time at poor people stores, like Roses or Fred's
I remember I spent a whole year collecting KoolAid packet codes to finally have enough to get a red VideoNow. I think it came with a Fairly Odd Parents and a SpongeBob disc. Yeah it was black and white and skipped like hell, but for someone who was still using a bootleg walkman in 2009 this thing was heaven. So worth it.
Bro its one thing if you have a proprietary video disc format that doesnt work on regular dvd players as well as dvds not working on it Its another thing if the screen has a lower resolution than a TI-83 😂
Had the color version growing up. Sure made road trips much more bearable to my younger self. I do remember them not having any shock absorption, and they always felt cheaply made. Indeed, mine met its fate when the latch holding the top down broke at some point. I had MANY discs for mine. I don’t recall any of my peers owning one though.
Never owned one but feeling a distinct "I'm four and peering into the tiny screen in a grimy airplane economy class seat not to enjoy the show but to drown out the misery of either having just thrown up or going to do that just now" vibe
Or "My parents handed me this on a car trip to satiate my TV addiction only to be completely unsatisfied because the sound was completely drowned out by the engine and every little bump in the road made the CD skip, so it was essentially barely watchable"
I am 25 now and when my siblings and I were younger we all got the color versions for Christmas the same year and we all loved them. We were kids and didn't care about the resolution. Honestly we probably thought it was the best that could be achieved back then. These kept us occupied on many road trips. It was a great product that met the goal for it's intended audience.
Yea thinking about it, in my memory, it was just as good as any other screen. This was also that spy gear era, where any 'mini' versions of technology felt SOOOO attractive and ground-breaking. lol I miss it
If you guys were wowed by the VideoNow, you would have fell in love with a portable VCD player from Panasonic. They were in color, stereo, higher resolution, could be connected to your tv, and had a built in screen. And they were slightly smaller than the videonow player.
It always amazes me that one of the selling points for things like this is that they say you can trade the media with your friends. When you know no parents allowed their children to just give trade the media that cost so much.
"It's like having a Game Boy that plays television programs!" Never mind that GBA video cartridges came out in 2004 as well for A) something millions of people already had, B) a device that also plays games and C) was in color from the get go.
Very True. There were some issues with it though, but the Video Now systems had the same issues (not-the-best screen quality, no backlight). Unless you had the GBA SP, which solved the backlight issue. (also all gba screens seem decently better than video now ones).
Not really from the get go, because there was the original gameboy which didn't have a color display. But it did have color from the moment the video cartridges came out, I'm just kinda being a smartass about it
Everyone had one when I was a kid !! They were super popular at my school the reason I got one was bc all my friends had one but when I actually got mine and used it I thought it was so lame. I had a portable DVD player and I was like “why do I need this” lmao
I remember seeing commercials and wanting one. I never saw anyone who had one. I ended up getting one on my birthday when they were getting scarce. I think I had like 3 "DVDs" on it. I really enjoyed that thing. Years later as an adult when I found it again in a box somewhere, I realized how small the screen actually was and pixelated.
Came across one of these at a Goodwill (landscape orientation, like Game Gear) You should open products up on this channel, these units are SUPER jank inside as well :)
I remember seeing this thing as a kid and thinking "This. This is truly the future of mobile entertainment". Thankfully I never got the chance to hold one in my hands to see my dreams shattered.
I remember thinking something very similar. Now I'm watching 1080p video on my phone, browser, mobile gaming, music player, pda device with wireless noise cancelling headphones. 12 year old me could not have imagined how incredibly obsolete cell phones have made basically everything that was mobile. And sadly those digital mobile devices only lasted a few years. The stand alone cell phone itself was largely adopted and replaced by the smart phone in just 15 years. Maybe in 10 years we'll all have VR/AR glasses or something.
This is a perfect Techmoan video. Context, researched, explained out, answered all the questions, great camera recording quality and angles. The time you put into production really shows!
Totally, and a obscure device of dubious usability value. Or just plain too obscure, where you still end up interacting with it in some unexpected way. Just the way it should be!
Honestly I think the first version is surprisingly watchable even at 80x80 pixels, though that might just be because I still know the episodes from my childhood and my brain is filling in the rest.
No, ive not seen it before and i agree. Although i did grow up playing atari 2600, apple2 and commodore 64 games, then the original gameboy, so perhaps im just used to the style of image delivery haha
@@Colt45hatchback lol yup same here.. my first video game console was pong... but i do remember those years.. and star wars figures.. and playing with them with my best friend of that time on his porch.. ahh good times.
I would say that the black and white version kind of looks more watchable than the color version. In addition, the high quality audio does a lot of the heavy lifting
It looks watchable to me, and this was before my time. Other than the issues I can think of when not having a backlight, it doesn’t look absolutely unwatchable.
I remember my kids having this device and I think I spent more time fiddling with it than they did, you could either modify the unit to accept regular sized CDs with judicious use of a Dremel or just get mini CD-Rs and lose a bit of storage (which is what I did). There was some rather basic free apps to author your own PVDs so I made a few myself, but my kids lost interest in the device rather fast as they skipped if you gave them the slightest nudge and that's just not practical for preschoolers who never stop moving around! We ended up buying them portable DVD players instead that got far more use. Nowadays it's more sensible to just get a cheap tablet with a good kid proof case.
I was born in 2000 and had wanted this as a kid, i ended up getting a panasonic portable dvd player with this fat removable battery. Would last like 2 days
@@Di3mondDud3 I remember the picture quality on those portable DVD players being awesome. I had one when I was 12/13 and it had the best colour and contrast I'd ever seen on a screen up until that point. I guess it was because the screen was so small, so the image wasn't stretched out.
I spent $70 on one of these. Only had 2 discs for it. A few months later Video Now Color came out and replaced Video Now with a pretty small library of content having been released for the original. I was pretty mad.
I think you really said it, it was just "good enough" for its time. If you didn't have enough money for a GBA and it's video cartridges, this would definitely keep little Timmy entertained on the road trip because kids don't necessarily know what good quality video/audio is. But by 2003 my dad had installed one of those flip-down screens in our family car so I could bring my DVDs along and thankfully not have to suffer through a VideoNow.
I remember I brought my original Xbox on a road trip one time as a kid after my dad got a set of those headrest mounted LCD screens with an AV-in feature. Within a couple hours of driving and using the Xbox, the laser disc reader inside it got miscalibrated from the vibration and that Xbox was toast after that. Expensive lesson learned as a kid lol, stick with the handhelds.
@anonUK I'm not certain of the details, this was 20 years ago when I was like 8 or 9 years old. I just know the game I was playing stopped working and the Xbox couldn't read discs anymore. Maybe these days it would be worth it to fix but back then those consoles were readily available to just buy a new one.
These came out when I was 13 and even then I thought they were crap. Really seems like despite the marketing targeting teenagers, it's best market is the 4-10 range. By the mid 2000's it wasn't overly uncommon for teenagers to have their own laptops that would play actual DVDs.
These types of things actually used teenagers in their marketing for a reason. Preteens looked up to teenagers and wanted to be "cool" like them, so if they saw a teen in an ad, they'd want the product in order to be seen as cool. I don't think any actual teenager of the time would get this.
@@MartinGiadrosich I was surprised to hear these came out in 2003, I thought they cane out sometime between 1999 and 2001 because I remember seeing ads for these, but I can't imagine I would have watched any programs the ads would have run on when I was 13. I thought it was interesting from a technical standpoint but had no desire to own one. Of course with Web 2.0 just a few years away, it''s almost comical with hindsight to think they ever stood a chance.
@@MartinGiadrosich Same with Nerf. Teens aren't gonna run around shooting each other with Nerf guns pretending to be some military heroes, but seeing them in the ads sure got me to beg for them as a little kid.
I had the XP version! I had access to two computers, a TV, and a portable DVD player. At the time I was 8 and got it simply because I had a budding interest in tech and loved getting my hands on whatever tech toys I could get my little rural hands on lol
I remember having the color version of this *and* the XP version. The XP model came with "bonus features" for certain discs that included a game (usually just a basic trivia game) and a scene select feature.
@@Karmy. as a kid there was nothing else like it that was affordable. There were portable DVD players but they were expensive and kinda fragile. It usually came with a carry case, but a kid could easily drop it and break it
I remember the VideoNow fondly. When I was little, my sister and I got the first VideoNow, and then a couple years later, the VideoNow Color, and after that, the VideoNow XP. We always took those and our GameBoy Advanced SP’s with us on road trips. Crazy to think that the same device I’m watching this video on has replaced the two technologies, I’ve referenced here.
@@CoralCopperHead Replaced was a pretty strong word. Handheld gaming is still alive with the switch, but seeing an increase in gaming on a phone is incredible.
Apparently, GBA video cartridges started coming out exactly a year after this thing launched. Seems like the far superior option, especially if you were savvy enough to be using flash carts back then. They weren't exactly uncommon at the time.
gba video was its own format with a shit ton of compression. most stuff ran at like 10 fps or less. it was short lived becouse it came out late in the gba life and a year later the psp was out with way higher quality movies. umd movies had a short but good run with tons of titles. if sony made a stand alone player it probably would have ran longer,
I fell into the trap of thinking I could relive the satisfaction of a toy I had as a kid. I bought the 1970s Kenner "Give A Show Projector" off auction and was *really* disappointed in the quality of the images it projected. Lesson learned. Enjoy the memories of that old toy. You'll never get them back as an adult.
@@ravenmadd1343 Haha, true! Although it also depends on if the technology is new. If you know there is another device that's better, even if you're a kid, your brain stops "filling in the gaps," and dreams of the better thing.
I did this with gooey louie. As a kid, it was one of my favorites. Bought a retro version of it as an adult to play with some of the kids in the family. Being an adult made the repetative fake sneezing noise unbearable.
I bought one of these when I was a kid when they first came out! The video quality didn't matter to me, watching spongebob while riding the bus home from school was awesome! I remember I bought it with the money I had saved up from helping my grandmother. Such a wonderful memory
How did you keep it from skipping? I couldn’t go a mere 20 seconds on my bus with one. Ended up just asking for a portable DVD player the next holiday with gifts came around plus added in some earned money. Much better investment especially for the YA and teenage market they were pushing this for.
Yeah people forget there weren't cell phones or video mp3 players back then. Being able to pull something out of your pocket and watch a video was a big deal, regardless of the quality. Like he said at the end, it's perfectly fine for what it is.
And I think that's the thing, most kids wouldn't care about the video quality by much as long as they were amused and distracted while in the vehicle, which the latter made adults, particularly adults happy that they didn't have kids whining and complaining and asking are we there yet every 2 seconds.
One of my most cringe memories from my childhood was having my heart set on getting a JuiceBox - a c. late 90s/ early 00s portable video player aimed at kids, with proprietary cartridges that played about 40 minutes of low framerate colour kids tv shows. You could get clips for the cartridges to carry them around, and the JuiceBox itself came with a screen that flipped around so you could stand the player up and watch it hands free. Anyway, the cringe part of this story comes from hindsight. When my mum took me out one day after school to go get my JuiceBox from Argos, we first went into a GAME store to see if they had it - they didn’t, but the salesman upon being told what the device was instead advised that we get a PSP (PlayStation portable). My mum turned to me and said “do you want a PSP instead?” and I said no 🙃
I've got a similar story from when I got my second phone as a kid. I had the choice between a Samsung SGH-F480 and the first iPhone. I chose the Samsung because the listing said it had games and the iPhone didn't...
As a late 2000s to early 2010s kid, I would have loved the idea of this. My very own video player! And then I would have been bored with it after a few plays and tossed it in a drawer for the next decade, only to find it now in 2022 and go "oh yeah, that was kinda neat!"
@@kennypowers1945 If you were poor like we were, you wouldn't have an iPod, you'd have a second-hand mp3 player. Or you'd go over to someone's house to use their ps2 or ps1. Though TBH I think most people just listened to music at home on CD players. Tape was still around as well, but most players played both.
I remember seeing the commercials for these and thinking that it was a cool concept. I always thought it was aimed at young children age 4 to 13 from the advertising. Using teenagers to represent how "cool" the product was was a tactic used to sell little kids on a product around that time. If you think about it, you wouldn't want to give your child a expensive gaming handheld.
as a kid I remember seeing the commercials and thinking how dumb of a concept it was, I was like "why would I ever want to waste my allowance on something that can only play in black and white when I can just rent the DVDs from my library and watch them on the big screen at home"?
The Gameboy Advanced SP was 99.99 dollars and a much higher quality device around the same time. Same price as the original Gamboy from 1989. Technically less based on Inflation.
@@JohnKelly2 I know but the game library was amazing and much more support than whatever this thing was. You were still better off buy a portable DVD player than buying one of these devices.
it's so weird seeing stuff I distinctly remember from my childhood on this channel. I actually really wanted one of these, but I never actually got one. Grandparents actually ended up getting me another format that was around at the time, a Juice Box, and wow I remember it being way worse than this. It was way less successful. The videos actually came on little cartridges and I just remember being extremely unimpressed. It would be interesting to see a video about that on this channel, because it's probably even more obscure. I remember both of them littering thrift stores for years afterwards.
I had one of those Fisher Price record players when I was a kid, the 'records' are surprisingly beefy. They made _exceptional_ throwing weapons for use against one's siblings. 😏 My god... 80x80 pixels and 15fps... I'm amazed they sold _any_ of these things. That is utterly freakin' abysmal! Even your average ten-year-old in the early aughts had higher standards than that!
@@belliduradespicio8009 idk, as someone who had an original Game Boy in 1989, I still would've laughed at them trying to sell these things at the time. But yeah, now? Stuff like this would never, _could_ never, exist.
I had one of those toy record players as a little one in the 90s - I thought it was so cool and blame things like that for why I repair phones and mess with electronics now lmao
I'll never forget the first time I saw one of these. It was the summer of '03, and I was chilling at a friend's house for the weekend during my summer vacation. He had gotten a brand new cellphone and wanted to show it off to everybody. As he was showing everybody the functions of his new phone, I saw one of these sitting beside his charging cable and asked what it was. He demonstrated how it worked, and I spent the last hour or so binging Spongebob Squarepants. He noticed how enamored I was with this old tech and asked if I wanted to buy it off him for $20. I grew up pretty damn poor, and any and all allowance money/B-Day money I could've saved went towards this. I bought it a month later after begging my dad for permission and I cherished it ever since. Up until it was stolen from a kid in my neighborhood...
Let me just say as a kid when these came out this thing felt magical Being able to watch television shows anywhere was a revolution despite it not being very good at all actually. The color one a year later was much better.
@@simontay4851 they also cost 4x what the video now cost at the time for one without a battery and 6-8x for one with a rechargeable battery that lasted about two hours. So I could either A.) Get a video now for $40 on sale And discs for $8 a piece Or B.) Spend $300-$400+ for a decent portable DVD player and $30 for movies. Which do you think was more viable for a twelve year old?
@@simontay4851 Watching this video, I have never been more glad that my parents got me a proper portable DVD player for Christmas over this piece of junk.
I remember seeing the video now as a kid, while having the GBA spongebob/pokemon cartridges and thinking "wow what a waste, my gameboy plays games AND i can watch timmy turner on it!"
I definitely remember the TV ads for this as a kid here in the States, they certainly did a good job making it look way better on TV than it did in reality, holy crap!
I had the Video Now Color when I was younger. It was honestly revolutionary for it's time. As one of the younger siblings growing up I rarely had say over the tv so the video now was the perfect media for watching what you like on your own accord
Crazy I remember a birthday party at my elementary school and being sooo jealous because my classmate got one. It just feels so unreal seeing how much stuff the ipod and iphone wiped out.
Fond memories for sure. I had both the B&W and then later the color version. It was definitely a special toy for me as a kid since I saved up my own money to buy them. Spent many hours watching it secretly in bed when I was supposed to be asleep. Simpler times.
I remember getting the first model for christmas, and I only ever had the sample disk that came with it. I always wanted more videos but I could never afford them, so I was stuck watching the Band Geeks episode from Spongebob over and over and over 😂
When it comes to electronics/audio equipment this channel is always the most fun and has influenced me more than any other.ive been busy lately so I've got some catching up to do.i want to thank you for all the great/interesting content🔥
There was also the PSP in 2004 which was probably the best way to watch media on the go at that time since it also played games and had a decent screen. Now our smartphones can do it all and we just take it for granted these days but looking back just makes me appreciate how good we have it now.
Agreed u mean the first gen psp, before the go and vita right ? Cause i never forget those cute discs to watch movies xD they even had some bangers cause sony owned many movie rights. Like i got the psp 2000 or 3000 i need to check it out. Hack ur og psp so u can watch most movies these days on it.
omg what a throwback, a family member who is into retro tech gave me one years ago because he found it on a second hand store and couldn't do much with it, with some digging I found a weird plugin for a programthat let me convert video into the format this uses and I was able to record it onto normal cd-rs (and then cut the excess so it fit) it was really funny tbh it had no DRM at all
When they first came out, I remember getting a special Kool-aid branded VideoNow player with a koolaid logo on the front of it. I think it was one of those things where you bought it with the koolaid points off the packages or something. I loved that darn thing, and I think I still have it stored away somewhere. Now Band Geeks is permanently etched into my brain.
I had a video now as a kid and I didn’t notice the screen being bad. In my memory it was amazing. Seeing this through a grown up lense is one thing, but as a kid this product was awesome.
Just a note: It is possible that the backlight of the device is not what we are used to. I mean, maybe when he was new, the screen would have a brighter backlight, and over the years it's been fading. There is a type of backlight that I don't remember the name of [edit: its called EL-lamp/"high field electroluminescent"/Electroluminescent Lamp], but it is a sheet that contains some chemical things, and when a certain electric current passes through it, it lights up. This has been used a lot in the past (it's present in the Akai S1000 sampler for example, and if you look for an akai s1000 today, you won't find it with a working backlight) even if you don't use it, over the years this chemical reaction gets null, and will not produce light. I believe that this was chosen in options that would not physically fit an LCD with CCFL backlight, because every time I opened a display that used this chemical reaction system, it was not simple or easy to make a mod to use ccfl, since there is no space behind of the display (which makes the whole set thinner and lighter)
2004 seems like a foreign country, it's really hard to remember what I was doing then. I was in my teens, so I remember vaguely being curious about the video now player from a technical perspective, but enough to actually fork over that much money just to stick the disk into my CD-ROM, because that is exactly what I would've done with it
Man I didn't realize how out-of-the-loop I was as a kid. All I wanted was DVDs, an occasional LEGO set, and maybe a Blue's Clues or Dora toy. VideoNow doesn't connect to me at all, even though I was only a bit under the age range of this toy in its "prime." Kinda goes for most toys I WAS in the target audience for, too, though. I was a boring kid 😂
Lol this is the comment I relate to most on this vid so far. I don’t think I was boring for it though; I think I was just blessed with a really good TV & satellite cable as a kid, so the concept of this product just never appealed to me when I could either 1) play games on my GameBoy Advance or 2) remember the episodes pretty vividly & in color lol.
As kids we weren't going to be exposed to every product that we were the target demographic for. Plenty of things that passed me by. This was pre-internet (well not completely - but before the internet was what it is now) so information didn't spread so quickly nor as widely
AFAIK, the b&w model wasn't released in Europe, hence the "VideoNow" name for the color model. In US it was called "VideoNow Color". VideoNow Jr. used its own flexible(!) discs, btw. They were bendable to prevent kids breaking them. There was also a VCamNow camera intended to shoot the videos to be recorded onto PVD discs later (a copy of VideoNow Media Wizard was included with it).
I had the VCamNow and loved it! Was a surprisingly compact cheap little video camera for the time. I'm sure the quality was probably 240p 15FPS at best lol.
I remember buying the colour version of this for my son. But it wasn't anywhere near as cheap here in Australia as you've discussed. I believe I paid ~$125 for the player without any discs bundled. The discs were ~$30 which was the price of an actual DVD. So we got him 3 when we purchased the player and after seeing not only the poor quality but the exceptionally short run time on the batteries (which you didn't cover), we didn't buy anymore discs. It made more sense just to buy normal DVDs. If the discs had actually been $8 that would have been different.
@@davemeads859 not really, it’s been $60 for a very long time, at least since the 90s. Considering the complexity and the increased cost of making the games, it should have increased by a lot, But $60 is the standard.
I remember when I was a kid I got some Super Soaker rocket toy that would use water pressure to shoot the rocket up into the air. It was recalled due to safety concerns and I got one of the original black and white VideoNow players and a bundle of various discs as compensation. I used it a ton and loved it, but eventually about a year later my family got a portable DVD player so it wound up just gathering dust.
That was a real recall?!? Same thing happened to me! Initially I believed my parents on the recall but after a few years I became skeptic that they just thought the rocket was dangerous, returned it, and bought the videonow for me to pass time. B/W version. Blue like the video. Came with case and I think headphones. Also came with spongebobs band geeks episode (iirc this was a single episode demo disk of some kind) and then a fairly oddparents disk, which had the episode “information stupor highway”
I think the context really is part of what sold the VideoNow, the whole idea of massively portable video was a huge novelty and something media nerds like 10 year old me had wanted for forever.
I remember finding a watchman in my mom's closet and was like why the fuck didn't you tell me you had this lol. I could watch cartoons in the woods it was life changing lol
You have unlocked a memory for me, I remember in 2005 (when I was 9 years old) my mum got me the VideoNow as a birthday present. Safe to say, the screen was tiny and the main purpose was to watch a few SpongeBob episodes, it used to skip a lot too.
I wanted one of these when I was a kid, but my parents bought me a regular portable DVD player instead. looking back, I'm glad they got me that instead.
They definitely did you a HUGE favor by getting you a REAL portable DVD player instead of a VideoNow. I hope you were grateful and didn't pout about it lol😂
@@franktruth9639 I was actually quite happy with it even when I first got it. The household had thousands of DVDs so I was happy I could play all that on it lol
@@linus607 Well that's good to hear you weren't a spoiled brat. I just remember how back in the 2000s the technology used to look so appealing and futuristic (especially to a kid), and the VideoNow definitely LOOKED cool, but it was hot GARBAGE in reality....meanwhile a portable DVD player might have LOOKED boring to a small child, but it is a much better gift.
@@franktruth9639 for sure. I remember it being a boring grey colour, but it had a much bigger 7 inch display and I remember the picture quality being "good" (for the time anyway.. LCD technology has definitely come some ways since then). Picture quality was definitely way better than the Video now though! One feature I loved about it is the RCA input. I could connect my Nintendo 64 to it and play it on that. Was really cool.
This kind of thing seemed more common in the 90's, the predatory marketing of substandard electronic devices to children. Back in the 70's and 80's when I grew up, we mostly used older devices that were made for adults (tv's, stereos, radios, etc.) when they upgraded to newer and better models.
One thing I remember about the 70s and 80s is that 'upgrading' an electronic device seemed like a lifetime, we wernt poor but still made things last. I was well grown up before being able to afford the next best thing and upgrade on a whim. An ugly old TV only got replaced when it went 'on the blink' even then most people I knew, parents had them repaired. Renting was a big thing, but don't know how they faired.
@@mick8473 you're right. My parents had the same little National TV from before I was born until well into my teens. "Upgrading" wasn't so much of a thing for most people. Also, it was easier to get stuff repaired.
Growing up in the 90's we had one 80's Goldstar TV and a basic sharp VCR. They were frequent visitors to the appliance repair shop, yet had less faults than the Loewe TV/VCR/DVD set we had in the 2000's.
The 80x80, 4bit, 15fps format is probably the maximum they could do really cheaply because that will fit on the disc without any kind of compression - just throw the data from the disc on the LCD.
That makes sense. At 25 minutes that works out to just under 70 MB of video data, which would fit on a 8.5 cm CD. The fact that the player also doesn't feature any shock protection suggests that they put the absolute bare minimum amount of electronics in there.
@@Astfgl Well that's always been Tiger Electronics MO to sell old tech, or slightly old tech in fancy packaging at rock bottom prices to kids with big marketing budgets. It sure did get a lot of us late 80's, and early 90's kids to get our parents to buy us their crappy LCD games for $15 - $20 a pop, along with a wack ton of AA batteries which never came with the product, of which I'm sure made those battery companies happy LOL!
I think there was some free space. I forget the details but I messed with a videonow disc once and decoded it and i think they're wasting like 1/4 of the space (1 byte out of each 4 byte 16 bit stereo sample). But whatever they were doing was probably just computationally simpler, but 160x80 or something would've been a _huge_ jump in quality.
This video was just recommended to me through the algorithm and I can’t tell you how shocked I was when you opened on that fisher price record player. I bought that exact toy a couple years ago for $15 on a thrift app because I like vintage toys, it still works and has all the records still! I’m only 22 I didn’t know that toy was that old! Really blew my mind lmao. Definitely checking out more of your vids
23 here and I have vivid memories of playing with that toy and trying to figure out how it worked. Pretty amazed it’s that old too. Guess it was a hand me down.
I remember working at Walmart when the Video Now Color came out. It was $75 & a portable DVD player was $100. I couldn't believe that $25 more meant you could just play all the movies you had at home.
I have to be brutally honest here. I loved this device as a kid. Sitting on the bus on the way to school watching this thing was a nightmare, as you said it was very prone to stuttering. Watching TV shows on long road trips was nice, but only in the day and using it as a "white noise machine" at night. The low quality wasn't the worst thing as watching normal television broadcasts at the time was about 240P for those that didn't own a High Definition TV. Owning one of these was nice as we couldn't really afford an iPod. Looking at it now makes me sad to see the golden age of my childhood was all just smoke and mirrors of the tech companies just trying to make a buck. Great video though. Kudos and you just earned another subscriber. Keep up the great work.
480i in NTSC regions like america and Japan, 576i for rest of the world, or 819i for some French TV stations. Of course, none of this matters because the TV's were on avg 24 inch screen size well up until the early 2000s.
i completely agree as kid who never got a adsl before 2011(i'm 1996)...tbh i call crazy parents who buy iPod and go on to their kids being brutally honest too. it is good, for the target. as i like to say i had always used crappy pcs and stuffs until i found my real first job then invest my money in my mac mini...my first pc was a crappy vista desktop. even if people used XP i was still using a 98 using phone as adsl. this is amazing, for the target and the price...surely would be better a fully dvd player with just a crappy display(surely) but still to me makes sense.
Some of those GBA video carts can get pretty bad in quality. Especially the double feature ones that have to sacrifice pretty much everything for longer runtime. Not quite as bad as this 80x80 monochrome video though. Of course, the trade-off there is sound quality which is quite bad on GBA unless you are using a Play-Yan Micro's pass through or some such.
Which is a bit ironic. These discs have the ROM space for quality, but the hardware is garbage. The GBA video carts have the hardware for quality, but the cartridge limits the ROM and now it has to decompress the video cutting further quality.
The GBA Video carts were 32 MB for two episodes. It’s a shame Hasbro didn’t license the same tech. They could’ve had much higher quality with those 500 mb discs
I had this as a kid and watched Band Geeks on repeat. I never thought I’d see this thing again and never knew how bad it actually looked as a kid, the only part that bogged me was the lack of color
I remember thinking how cool this was when I was a kid, although I don't think I ever used a Video Now. My family went for laptop-style portable DVD players and I remember vividly watching Star Wars and National Treasure with my brother on our way to whatever camp site we would be staying at. I ended up using one of the DVD players as a monitor for my camera, since it had an AV in/out port and the display was surprisingly useful for that.
I remember seeing the commercials for these in my later childhood years and was pretty impressed... For about 5 minutes until I remembered that portable DVD players existed and were already reasonably priced for most families by the time the color model came out.. LOL
@@hzy2k964 they had those in early 90's, maybe even in the 80's. we had one. it was black and white and the channels were limited but it worked pretty well.
I got a VideoNow Color for Christmas as a kid, and I loved it. I remember it coming in a box rather than a plastic package, and I also got episodes of Spongebob, Jimmy Neutron, and the Star Wars discs shown in the video. I'm pretty sure the discs came with the box. I would rewatch those discs over and over. It's wild to think how personal video media players were such a crazy idea back then, while now I can stream nearly any show on my phone.
I had one of the VideoNow Color players and as a young kid it was really cool, but looking back wow was it terrible. We did anything back then to try to get tv shows with us on road trips. Eventually we ended up getting a mini tv with a VHS player built in and put it on a stand in our mini van. That was a much better experience.
Spoiled kids, when I was young we had the pleasure of listening to what was ever on the crappy car radio and the privilege of looking out the window on car trips. 😆
Besides the need for cheaper components that consume less power, I'm sure the main constraint that led them to use a low-res display was the amount of data that could fit on the small discs.
I remember getting the XP from my dad when I asked him to buy me a Gameboy. The confusion stems from its shape and the fact that we didn't know a lick of English with us being immigrants and all that. However, I did enjoyed the XP because that's all we had.
Did your pop ever learn English? If so, have you ever reminded him and all of you had a good laugh at his confusion? Bless his heart for his good intentions, though🙂
@@customfantasyhotwheels sorry for the very late reply. Nope he never got around to it. Living in California makes it too comfortable to not learn English because there is a huge Vietnamese community there. Also he did picked up a lot of English, when born near the end of the Vietnam war but he forgot most of it. However, simple sentences and words he can understand.
I'm actually pretty surprised by how much less awful it is than I expected it to be. I saw these as a gimmick at the time, but I had the benefit of being a teenager who had already begged for a real portable DVD player for christmas.
I remember getting the XP model and the disc burning software on deep clearance and having fun making my own music video discs (would have been in my late 30s then). From what I remember doing research on modifying standard cd-rs (I never bothered, seemed like too much trouble) the VideoNow discs read from the outside toward the center which is the reverse from standard cd and dvds.
I remember seeing ads for the VideoNOW back in the day either on TV or gaming magazines. I have always felt that it was just a gimmick, and never bothered with it. Also, already had a Gameboy Advance at the time, and felt that GBA Video was going to be more worth it. I personally chose some GBA Video carts, but ultimately it was the cost of actual portable DVD players becoming more affordable and phones being able to watch videos that ended both VideoNOW and GBA Video carts.
Imagine going back to the 1920s and showing the pioneers of television what was possible 80 years later with this device. They'd have been so thoroughly disappointed.
@@telx2010 lemme guess: the earth is flat, moon landings were a hoax, and television is a lie, there are actually little aliens inside your TV pretending to be a video signal
I worked at Wal Mart when this thing launched and we got a lot of parents trying to return these because they either didn't know what they were buying or they found that the discs were much easier for kids to scratch up than DvDs. Also, by this point wal mart did have a bin full of older DvDs for $5 and dollar public domain discs existed, so this wasn't even that cheap when you included the price of discs. I ended up just spending $100 getting my younger brother and sister a portable DvD player so they could play the discs they already owned on a colour 8 inch screen and they were much happier than their friends with Videonow and they kept using that player for over a decade while videonow was dead a year or two latter. It was a fad.
The only reason why I was ever interested in Videonow after being a kid was because it contains some of the only merchandise of My Life as a Teenage Robot you can find. Such a mistreated show...
@@BronzeBrawnIsCool honestly, that is so true. It was like the mid 2000’s that they were like “fuck it, we have the biggest multimedia franchise on earth, we don’t need to try anymore.” And then literally every other one of their shows was basically dead
@@wolfetteplays8894 Teenage Robot suffered the worst because it came out when Nickelodeon was promoting the first SpongeBob movie. They weren't gonna try anything new when they have something that was successful enough to keep them profiting.
The quality is low, but, we need to judge it by the timing, back then, portable DVD players were $300-350, they were heavy for a kid to carry, and these were the main other option of watching videos, portable media players that supported video did not exist until these weren't made anymore, and the infrastructure to buy content for them didn't develop properly until about half a decade later, for the iPod video (Oct. 2005), a lengthy encoding was needed for any media that you wanted to play on it, that's not a good solution for something that kids could use, even if you ignore the 4-5x price.
I bought 2 of these for my kids on long trips - although they were color. I've never seen a B&W one. This was before DVDs were in cars and before they had portable players.. or at least ones that didn't cost an arm and a leg. They kept the kids occupied though with their own players and a few sets of shows!
Those other devices were around but yeah they were expensive. I guess if you had enough kids to fill a minivan you'd put a DVD player in the ceiling instead. It doesn't seem like something a kid would use on their own when they could just watch TV, and why take it with you to a park or playground just to sit there and watch videos? It seems like the market for this wasn't well thought out.
@@stopthephilosophicalzombie9017 Amazing. When I was a kid we didn't need books or word puzzles to be entertained. We were told to sit down and be quiet, and look out the windows so not to be car sick while our parents smoked with the windows rolled *up*
@@MrTaxiRob Bought them for my kids. I had only two and the TV add-on for my minivan was $1000 while these were very cheap. Obviously if money was no object, these would never have sold. For most people, it is a factor.
I've never seen these in person so I can't be certain, but from this video I feel like the black and white version actually looks the best. I can see how that version could be practical for the time. The battery situation in the color one is particularly odd to me. It's like they were determined to use the same battery setup (maybe that would save money in manufacturing?) but found it was literally impossible so they had to quickly add another battery. I imagine that it doesn't last very long...which defeats the point of the whole "portable" thing. also lol at "super bright screen"
Back in the mid 2000s, I remember seeing these in the store and thinking it would be cool to get one for traveling, even though DVD players were way better, whether they were held by the viewer or post-market installed into the vehicle (along with composite inputs I frequently used with my PS2) by someone else.
But does it costs 50 dollar? No... iPod costs way more and that is not what parent will buy it and give it to child (which chance child can damage it)...
I had 2 of those. One was mine. The other one was thrown out of the school bus window as the bus was driving away after dropping me off and I went and picked it up and it still worked. As a kid it gave me the feeling of "omg I'm rich!" 😂
I actually prefer the black and white screen. It has a certain charm and the lack of colour helps everything look consistent (if bad). The colour screen is just barely good enough for me to start expecting it to be a proper screen and therefore I judge it more harshly.
@@Techmoan I think the PXL-2000 probably had the worst format of any commercial product: video with no helical scanning recorded on audio tape! Pre-recorded titles weren't available, of course, but it was a format.
I have one of these sitting new in its box and I had no idea the screen was going to be THAT bad. Wow, what a nugget!
“You can smell the pixels”
Hey Dank, love your videos! That's awesome, can't wait to see that brand new nug!
The Dank is here everyone!
"Can you believe no one bought this?"
Nugget man you could do weird mp4 players for a vid
The lack of shock protection IS A FEATURE! Imagine all the fun kids had making thier fav. characters skip! It's an INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE!!!
and just like that a 22 minute episode becomes 44
@@gierer797
INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE!!!
@@gierer797
And just like that 22 likes will soon become 2200
LMAO, underrated comment!
@@gamerguy425
Thank you!
I remember ‘Video Now’ very clearly. I wanted one, and almost got one for my birthday WAY BACK WHEN, but when my father saw the quality of the video itself instore, HE INSTANTLY said ‘HELL NO! im NOT spending my hard earned money on THAT, no way! Pick something else out.’ He would instead buy me a sizable stack of new gba games. Later that year, at christmas, he bought my siblings and i a PROPER portable DVD player to use on long car rides. Can’t say anyone regrets these choices.
you're father the man
@@figshwg facts
Same here. My father got me portable DVD and after some time, SpongeBob Movies
That’s how you know your parents love you. 😉
OKAY
There's something special about watching videos on low resolution screens. Like watching cutscenes on the DS felt magical.
I like bad video. One of my favorite things is to go to thrift stores and buy recorded blank vhs tapes. You get some awesome commercials from time past as well as some cool home movies sometimes. Or weird obscure movies abd shows. I like when it’s warped or also when it is very tiny. I had some movies on gameboy advanced and it was also bad but good bad lol
I had a Shrek/Shark Tale double feature for Game Boy Advance. Both movies, full, on one cartridge. Absolute game-changer that you could never replicate with an iPhone.
@@xylemphloemyou can use that stuff in edits and all that for cool effects
It's because you were a kid and you have nostalgia glasses on
@@soyoltoiIt felt magical because at the time it almost literally was. It was a technological stunt and marvel at the time. Video on a gameboy during the early 2000s was magical. Video on a phone during the early 00s was magical. All of that and more on a PSP in 2004... it was high end cutting edge technology.
As someone who had the original model as a kid and loved it, I can tell you the one you got was not faulty. It would frequently skip -- I would make it skip just for fun -- the glare was constant, the compression was outrageous, and the screen and image quality was laughable. Yet, I still thought it was the coolest thing ever.
I used to take it with me on family camping trips and it would skip horribly whenever we drove on a bumpy dirt road.
Exactly my experience. I watched the same disks over and over despite our family having portable DVD players, and plenty of DVDs. It was just a fun device.
Summed up my feelings perfectly. Everything about it was crappy. But I was watching SpongeBob in the car so I was happy! As a kid you don't know any better!
I was in the target demographic for the VideoNow when it was released - and used it plenty on car rides with friends, etc - but I never ended up owning one. My family was instead persuaded into buying a portable DVD player at just around the same time - 2004-ish. The VideoNow color at $75 + limited discs was a REALLY hard sell at a time when house-brand portable DVD players complete with lithium rechargeable batteries were under the $100 mark and usually featured bigger, brighter, clearer, higher-resolution screens.
I agree with Mat's assessment at the end - don't let me ruin your fond memories!! But the tech here just wasn't impressive for the cost.
it made sense why they did what they did. It was built to a price point and they knew the audience they were targeting: 4-13 year olds.
4 to 13 year olds aren't really gonna care that much about the quality of the screen because the novelty of it would've been impressive. That being said these days for about the same price even with inflation you can buy a tablet with a far more impressive screen. It's really a testament to how some things have gotten better for less or about the same. It also has to be said about the portability of those "portable" dvd players. They were larger and better, yes. But I think for some they just liked that it was simple and worked, at least a parent's perspective.
I was immediately wondering why anyone would buy one of these when portable DVD players were around at the time. In 2004 I got my first laptop for £50 from ebay, after a pretty cheap hard drive upgrade it did me for portable media for a few years.
Same we got a zenith portable DVD player 9 inch color lcd, also had video input. This was circa 2005 2006. Lots of my friends had portable players. We swap dvds of our favorite anime shows
@@Milamberinx I was wondering the same. I guess the only draw would be the titles? Seems like they heavily leaned into the Nickelodeon tie-in, and maybe those titles wouldn't have been available on DVD at the time? It's interesting how we've become so accustomed to having EVERYTHING available streaming, that's it's difficult to imagine how novel having TV shows on a portable device would probably have been.
By then minivans offered an LCD screen that folds down from a console attached to the ceiling behind the driver and front passenger seats for the kids to watch videos.
When I was in middle school, this was one of the first devices I remember causing mass skepticism about advertising. At first everyone wanted one. A few kids got them, brought them to school, and it became clear that it was a glorified audio player with only 1-2 cartoons per disc. Within months there was a complete 180 where having one on the schoolyard got you made fun of and they disappeared from sight. The color one came out, but by then the name had been dragged through the mud and nobody wanted to be associated with them. Then portable DVD players came down in price and the GBA titles were released, and just like that it was a relic.
I'm a bit too old for the GBA video titles. I was busy with college at the time and never saw any of them, though I do own several GBA games still. The video cartridges look better than I expected.
Cool story ....
@@deusexaethera Those GBA video titles were just about watchable on the small, sometimes not even backlit GBA screens. They were incompatible with the Gamecube GBA player for a reason. I was also too old for those, but my younger siblings had them.
this is more or less what I remember about this. I remember wanting one at first, and fawning over one, but one lackluster GBA video title for christmas and a portable DVD player the year after basically made all of the child targeted media devices obsolete to me. Even my hand-me-down dreamcast could play CDs well enough that I didn't NEED a poorly made anachronism of a walkman, and just a couple years later there would be streaming services and media files that further obsoleted any attempt to sell me a proprietary format. I'm still a bit of a physical media nut but the sheer amount of proprietary collectibles marketed to me as a child hasn't made me exactly adopt bluray over video files and streaming because it's relatively restrictive and not a generalized portable format across devices like other previous physical media.
I never even heard of these things until now. When I was a kid the schoolyard was just Gameboy advance and PSPs. Although I feel I didn't miss out on much
I remember my older brother having one of these when I was little and I was *beyond* jealous! You can watch cartoons without having to watch through commercials! AND he could watch TV *in the car*? Mindblowing. We were truly living in the future.
Which one?
I can imagine you seeing GBA Video quality
@RepentandbelieveinJesusChrist5 lmao
@@JackFoxtrotEDM i don't really remember, it was a dark blue one with color video
I had a laptop
I had one of these as a kid and I actually loved it! Despite being comparatively crappy, as a young kid in the early 2000s there was a level of freedom or excitement involved with having a personal video player. Nothing else like it really existed at the time, at least for a broke kid like myself.
Portable DVD players were out.
I wholeheartedly agree. Being a lower middle class 8 year old it was definitely a step up from reading maps and street signs to being able to watch an episode of my favorite show on the go
In the early 2000s there were Archos media players that were 50x better than these.
I had a 486 with an Hauppauge WinTV. Did not watch a lot of TV with that setup but it taught me to program. Parents did their kids absolutely no favor by buying these toys.
@@Just.A.T-Rex how much ? Thats the point . This was affordable for parents to buy.
I remember seeing adds for these as a kid and thinking "that's a worse DVD player", not because of the quality, but because of the time limit. When buying discs was rare, cramming 4+ hours of video on a disc was a big plus.
your profile pic is the same as the screen in this thing
@@mrlithium69 :D
@@mrlithium69 No, it's conway's game of life
lol when I was like 13 I asked for the grownup version of this thing, a real dvd player from sears for christmas, unfortunately we got two faulty units that had to be returned, "builtin bateries wouldn't hold the charge" so yeah that kinda sucked. Damn I wish I remembered the brand and model so that I could find a similar one on ebay just for the nostalgia, hopefully one that still works. It was round, had a flipout kickstand, played dvd and MP3s, came with a set of foldup on-ear stereo headphones and a black canvas case. Unit had a 3inch color TFT screen I believe it even had a micro sd card slot on the side for mp3 files. Year was 2006 I wound up getting a squared off version of the same machine from radioshack instead, I still have that one, same idea only it is square not round. It also stopped reading discs after a year of owning it lol but I kept it for whatever reason.
i seem to remember portable DVD players being more expensive but, maybe that's because we never actually shopped around then. (early to mid 2000s) i though portable DVDs players were well over $100 and DVD costs probably tad higher than. i guess a worse product for less money lol
For a second I was giving this product a break thinking it was some 90's toy. Then you pulled out the gameboy micro and that instantly aged it into just being a terrible product.
16:21 My favorite part XD
It was released the same year as the PSP with the much superior UMD that played on the much superior screen of the PSP
This was a totally different product. The video explains how this thing worked. GBA video wasn't in audio format.
When I was in 6th Grade (2006), they were really popular in school especially when it came to riding the bus & at lunch time but I was smart enough to not want one so I just took my Dad’s very expensive (at the time) portable DVD player (without permission) & watched actual full movies.
@@RevyXV LMAOOOOOOO
@@RevyXV what a fuckin' legend lmfao
@@RevyXV Bro, this is a prank! The prank:
People forget that the portable DVD players were a *big* ticket item when they first came out. $1200+. And they sold fairly well, even at that price!
Also stunning to see how fast the prices dropped in the iPhone era, halving every year thereafter, now a < $50 item.
Good times.
I had the color version as a kid. You're spot on about the video quality, it was awful. But the appeal was not the quality of the video, just the fact you could watch them portably at a price your parents were willing to pay.
They also had *NO* DRM, which is really shocking considering the price of the unit and the PVDs, especially when Viacom was the content owner on many of them. I ended up inadvertantly creating a VideoNow piracy ring at my elementary school. All I had to do was rip the PVDs in my cheap Windows XP eMachine, burn them to a CD-R, and then use scissors to cut the discs to size and sanded the sharp edges as much as I could. Eventually somehow I was able to get access to the teacher's paper cutter, for more neat disc cuts.
Any money that Viacom lost, ended up going to the Band-Aid corp, because we frequently had cuts on my fingers from the rough edges of the discs.
While it was a really crappy product, it did introduce me to hardware hacking.
I suppose they may have thought that using non standard disc sizes would be DRM enough, and that by controlling the 8.5 and 10.7 cm disc supply they would get all the money on pirate copies.
But even so I am surprised. This was the age of the Sony rootkit scandal, in which attempting to listen to Natasha Bedingfield caterwauling "theeeese words are my own" or Satyricon grinding out Volcano risked filling your PC with malware.
How did you manage to cut the cdrs to size using those tools without scratching or cracking rhe discs? Sounds tricky.
@@MrDemonsushiGuy So, CD-R's will pretty visibly indicate where the data is burned (starts in the center), most of the time the VideoNow images only took up about 2/3 of the disc (and even less for the B&W version), if you cut it properly, avoiding the sections that are burned with data -- you'll get a disc that should fit in the VideoNow. It's been well over 15 years since i've made a ghetto PVD, some memories are blurry. Your results may vary :)
It appears that they couldn't afford DRM. From what it looks like, they took the raw pixel values and packed it into Audio CD data. No compression. Likely what they did was buy a dirt-cheap audio CD mechanism, take the digital audio output and pipe it into a display. DRM/encryption/authentication that couldn't be easily copied would require much more hardware.
Damn I love this story.
Never really hits home how amazing it is that smartphones can do all the things they can do so effortlessly until we see something like this.
It's really just a cost thing. PDAs of the time were as capable but they were 10 to 20 times more expensive. Smartphones became so cheap today that everything else makes no sense.
The only major advancement most smartphones have made in the last ten years that makes them far superior is storage space. Around 2004, I remember mp3 players having a gigabyte of storage was good. Today, one gigabyte would only hold a single, standard definition movie. Most of the other improvements of smartphones are dependent on external changes, such as mobile date speeds improving, and apps or websites being optimized for phones.
Saying that, my Sony Ericsson S700 could do a nicer colour screen, and I could fit the entire Shrek movie on the things memory stick. I'd totally forgot I had that phone, but it was amazing! A bit more pricey than these players though, and you'd have to do your own yargh converting.
@@jackdough8164 The thing with PDAs was, they were expandable. You could get a GPS module which had it's own Microchip which did it's job. I had a PCMCIA jacket on my 2000 released iPAQ and it allowed me to install a WiFi card and a CF card for storage. There were cell-modules availabe. That made them even for their age quite more capable than todays totally sealed smartphone which rely on software support for everything. And yes the Dell Axim X50v I dreamed about came before the iPhone and had a higher resolution display (before retina half a century later).
pdas are just smartphones without the phone part. it's the same type of device.
I had one of these as a kid and I can tell you that I didn't notice any of the short comings of the design because I was young. Around that same time I was listening to CDs on a portable CD player which would also skip at the slightest bump so that wasn't anything out of the ordinary from my experience. I was just happy that I could watch SpongeBob in the backseat of my car while my parents ran errands. As an adult that now knows about video and audio quality, yeah this thing is terrible. I don't think it was meant for adults though. I think this was meant for kids that wouldn't notice that kind of stuff and indeed I didn't. It existed in a time frame where portable video players were new enough for it to be novel but just barely mature enough that only adults with experience would be able to notice the flaws.
My son now watches really bad resolution shows from 30-40yrs ago right after watching 4k content and doesn't ever comment that they look bad. While I think "man I cant believe we used to watch such low quality stuff"
The issue is it's not much cheaper than the higher quality solutions that were on the market at the time.
Agreed. I had one as a kid that I loved. I think I only ever had 2-3 discs for it, and I watched them excessively. I have no memory of it being THAT tiny or THAT pixelated. Heck I barely remembered that it was only black and white. I just remember how much I loved it and how much use I got out of it. It felt super cool at the time. Honestly kinda shocked watching this and realizing just how poor quality it actually was. But, I'd say I easily got my parent's money's worth out of it.
Agreed!
Portable video players actually came around with the 1989 launch of the Sony Video Walkman.
Many years passed, and we get what we got today.
Wow, it is almost impressing how they messed up the storage efficiency: 315MB for 25 mins equals to a bitrate of about 1,68 MBit for video and audio. Nowadays, we can easily decode a 720p video with stereo sound to fit into this bitrate and it looks good! Their 80x80px, 4bit colordepth with 15 frames format will take 409KBit when it is UNCOMPRESSED, so you still have 1,27 MBit left. And even if they put the mono audio uncompressed on that disc at 0,77 MBit (that is 44khz CD quailty!), they still have 0,5 MBit left for whatever. So yeah, in terms of data efficiency, they failed completely.
Yeah, even back then one could fit a feature length movie on a CD at a much higher resolution than that screen.
Hell, they could've put those videos in friggin' Adobe Flash format and still come out ahead of what they pulled off.
To be fair to the VideoNow, it was made to be cheap; which meant using older and simpler video encoding (eg MPEG-1). Using a more modern codec like MP4/Divx would make it too expensive for a kids toy.
True, but efficient codec hardware is expensive- the #1 priority here was obviously keeping it very cheap.
I'm 99% certain that the mono VideoNow is little more than a portable *audio* CD player design that's been cheaply adapted with minimal supporting hardware that does little more than buffer and feed the near-raw bitstream from one of the two channels to the LCD (one 16-bit sample = 4 x 4-bit pixels).
My own quick-n'-dirty calculations confirm that 80 x 80 at 15fps would take 48,000 bytes/sec (*1) without *any* compression. Even allowing for overheads, that's comfortably within the bitrate of 88,200 bytes/sec required for a single channel of CD audio.
(*1) 80 * 80 * 15fps = 96,000 pixels/sec. 4-bit greyscale means 2 pixels per byte, so 48,000 bytes/sec are needed.
@@Yeen125 I doubt that the original mono VideoNow even uses MPEG-1 or *any* compression. It's obviously based on audio CD hardware, and there's enough bandwidth within a single channel to get 4-bit (16-level) 80 x 80 video at 15fps uncompressed.
(Obviously that's not very efficient, but I'm guessing it meant you could essentially take the digital bitstream from one of the two "audio" channels and feed it almost directly to the LCD with only very simple buffering and support hardware needed).
@@NotATube "Good codecs are expense" sure, but passable codecs aren't, as indicated by the DVD ripper software available at the time at poor people stores, like Roses or Fred's
I remember I spent a whole year collecting KoolAid packet codes to finally have enough to get a red VideoNow. I think it came with a Fairly Odd Parents and a SpongeBob disc. Yeah it was black and white and skipped like hell, but for someone who was still using a bootleg walkman in 2009 this thing was heaven. So worth it.
This comment made me 😊
Same ! I still have mine!
those shows hit so well when it was the only thing to watch. I feel like they had depth to them that modern shows don't have
Plus it was something you worked towards and earned!
Bro its one thing if you have a proprietary video disc format that doesnt work on regular dvd players as well as dvds not working on it
Its another thing if the screen has a lower resolution than a TI-83 😂
Had the color version growing up. Sure made road trips much more bearable to my younger self. I do remember them not having any shock absorption, and they always felt cheaply made. Indeed, mine met its fate when the latch holding the top down broke at some point. I had MANY discs for mine. I don’t recall any of my peers owning one though.
Never owned one but feeling a distinct "I'm four and peering into the tiny screen in a grimy airplane economy class seat not to enjoy the show but to drown out the misery of either having just thrown up or going to do that just now" vibe
Or "My parents handed me this on a car trip to satiate my TV addiction only to be completely unsatisfied because the sound was completely drowned out by the engine and every little bump in the road made the CD skip, so it was essentially barely watchable"
It gives me more a vibe of "my parents are rich and incapable of caring or educating me so they'll throw money into my hands until I'm quiet"
Can confirm. My only memory of using this thing was on a plane when I was four.
proto ipad kid
Heavy "riding to the waffle house an hour from home to get picked up by dad for weekend visitation" vibes
I am 25 now and when my siblings and I were younger we all got the color versions for Christmas the same year and we all loved them. We were kids and didn't care about the resolution. Honestly we probably thought it was the best that could be achieved back then. These kept us occupied on many road trips. It was a great product that met the goal for it's intended audience.
Yea thinking about it, in my memory, it was just as good as any other screen. This was also that spy gear era, where any 'mini' versions of technology felt SOOOO attractive and ground-breaking. lol I miss it
I'm also 25 and got the colour version as a child. I thought it was incredible
If you guys were wowed by the VideoNow, you would have fell in love with a portable VCD player from Panasonic. They were in color, stereo, higher resolution, could be connected to your tv, and had a built in screen. And they were slightly smaller than the videonow player.
It always amazes me that one of the selling points for things like this is that they say you can trade the media with your friends. When you know no parents allowed their children to just give trade the media that cost so much.
Also isnt it the whole premise of online piracy? lol
Haha right? Even I wasn't even allowed to trade GB games I bought with my own birthday money lol
@@user-nd7rd8jo6h even
@@BeeTriggerBee well, with piracy you don’t lose whatever you’re giving. This would just be sharing/trading.
I mean, when I was a kid I used to trade video games with other kids. The secret was to not tell your parents.
"It's like having a Game Boy that plays television programs!"
Never mind that GBA video cartridges came out in 2004 as well for A) something millions of people already had, B) a device that also plays games and C) was in color from the get go.
Very True. There were some issues with it though, but the Video Now systems had the same issues (not-the-best screen quality, no backlight). Unless you had the GBA SP, which solved the backlight issue. (also all gba screens seem decently better than video now ones).
Ash Ketchum: It’s like TV without the TV.
You could get a tv antenna adapter for Sega's gamegear in the early 90s
You were in colour from the get go.
Not really from the get go, because there was the original gameboy which didn't have a color display. But it did have color from the moment the video cartridges came out, I'm just kinda being a smartass about it
I remember seeing commercials for these but never knew anyone who had them. Thanks for the peek! :)
I owned one and used it a lot during car rides. Mine also had color
I think I might have one stuck in storage somewhere
I had one with one episode of the fairly odd parents, but they were so expensive
I remember the commercials vaguely, but I don't think I've ever seen one.
Everyone had one when I was a kid !! They were super popular at my school the reason I got one was bc all my friends had one but when I actually got mine and used it I thought it was so lame.
I had a portable DVD player and I was like “why do I need this” lmao
I remember seeing commercials and wanting one. I never saw anyone who had one. I ended up getting one on my birthday when they were getting scarce. I think I had like 3 "DVDs" on it. I really enjoyed that thing. Years later as an adult when I found it again in a box somewhere, I realized how small the screen actually was and pixelated.
Came across one of these at a Goodwill (landscape orientation, like Game Gear) You should open products up on this channel, these units are SUPER jank inside as well :)
Even a quick glance at the transparent one screamed Jank.
I legit misread Landscape as Landfill.
WHAT!!! It's THE Ben Heck!!!
Watch more Techmoan! He routinely has to fix items he's gotten in before doing up his video, and he actually fixes them DURING the video. Nice!
I was waiting for him to fix the speaker but that part of the video didn't happen on this one.
I remember seeing this thing as a kid and thinking "This. This is truly the future of mobile entertainment". Thankfully I never got the chance to hold one in my hands to see my dreams shattered.
And then the iPhone came out lol
@@jacktringoli3299 No it didn't. Are you 12?
I remember thinking something very similar. Now I'm watching 1080p video on my phone, browser, mobile gaming, music player, pda device with wireless noise cancelling headphones.
12 year old me could not have imagined how incredibly obsolete cell phones have made basically everything that was mobile. And sadly those digital mobile devices only lasted a few years.
The stand alone cell phone itself was largely adopted and replaced by the smart phone in just 15 years.
Maybe in 10 years we'll all have VR/AR glasses or something.
@@richsackett3423 what? it did come out.
Also whats with the already accusations of him being 12?
@@richsackett3423 first iphone came out in 2007
This is a perfect Techmoan video. Context, researched, explained out, answered all the questions, great camera recording quality and angles. The time you put into production really shows!
More time and effort than was put into sourcing better screen tech for the actual VideoNow devices. 😆😆
Really? Where are the puppets?
Jk
Totally, and a obscure device of dubious usability value. Or just plain too obscure, where you still end up interacting with it in some unexpected way.
Just the way it should be!
Don't forget the seamless edit at 4:14. Made me chuckle.
@@ryanhardcastle725 had to do a double take on that one
At 1.8 GB per disk you can fit an entire season of animation with the encoding tech today
It's an audio CD not data though.
They were fools for not using the VCD format, which they could have licensed much cheaper than DVD.
Honestly I think the first version is surprisingly watchable even at 80x80 pixels, though that might just be because I still know the episodes from my childhood and my brain is filling in the rest.
No, ive not seen it before and i agree. Although i did grow up playing atari 2600, apple2 and commodore 64 games, then the original gameboy, so perhaps im just used to the style of image delivery haha
@@Colt45hatchback lol yup same here.. my first video game console was pong... but i do remember those years.. and star wars figures.. and playing with them with my best friend of that time on his porch.. ahh good times.
As someone who has never watched Spongebob, I would agree that they are perfectly viewable, but a backlight might have helped...
I would say that the black and white version kind of looks more watchable than the color version. In addition, the high quality audio does a lot of the heavy lifting
It looks watchable to me, and this was before my time. Other than the issues I can think of when not having a backlight, it doesn’t look absolutely unwatchable.
I remember my kids having this device and I think I spent more time fiddling with it than they did, you could either modify the unit to accept regular sized CDs with judicious use of a Dremel or just get mini CD-Rs and lose a bit of storage (which is what I did). There was some rather basic free apps to author your own PVDs so I made a few myself, but my kids lost interest in the device rather fast as they skipped if you gave them the slightest nudge and that's just not practical for preschoolers who never stop moving around! We ended up buying them portable DVD players instead that got far more use. Nowadays it's more sensible to just get a cheap tablet with a good kid proof case.
I was born in 2000 and had wanted this as a kid, i ended up getting a panasonic portable dvd player with this fat removable battery. Would last like 2 days
@@Di3mondDud3 I remember the picture quality on those portable DVD players being awesome. I had one when I was 12/13 and it had the best colour and contrast I'd ever seen on a screen up until that point. I guess it was because the screen was so small, so the image wasn't stretched out.
Or just let the kids play with toys.
@@jason_a_smith_gb any phone with vlc can do that.
Respect for hacking kids toys! :)
👍
I spent $70 on one of these. Only had 2 discs for it. A few months later Video Now Color came out and replaced Video Now with a pretty small library of content having been released for the original. I was pretty mad.
Mee 2 duder
😂 poor noobs
Never buy proprietary crap...
@@jorisbonson386 they made the purchase nearly 20 years ago and was most likely a child
@@DacAttack2142 and?
I think you really said it, it was just "good enough" for its time. If you didn't have enough money for a GBA and it's video cartridges, this would definitely keep little Timmy entertained on the road trip because kids don't necessarily know what good quality video/audio is. But by 2003 my dad had installed one of those flip-down screens in our family car so I could bring my DVDs along and thankfully not have to suffer through a VideoNow.
I remember I brought my original Xbox on a road trip one time as a kid after my dad got a set of those headrest mounted LCD screens with an AV-in feature. Within a couple hours of driving and using the Xbox, the laser disc reader inside it got miscalibrated from the vibration and that Xbox was toast after that. Expensive lesson learned as a kid lol, stick with the handhelds.
@@CadgerChristmasLightShowwhat? It just stopped working?
@@CadgerChristmasLightShow
If it was miscalibrated, couldn't it be put back in place? Or if it was shot completely, replaced?
@anonUK I'm not certain of the details, this was 20 years ago when I was like 8 or 9 years old. I just know the game I was playing stopped working and the Xbox couldn't read discs anymore. Maybe these days it would be worth it to fix but back then those consoles were readily available to just buy a new one.
@@CadgerChristmasLightShow
So your Dad just went back to the store and got a replacement under the warranty?
These came out when I was 13 and even then I thought they were crap. Really seems like despite the marketing targeting teenagers, it's best market is the 4-10 range. By the mid 2000's it wasn't overly uncommon for teenagers to have their own laptops that would play actual DVDs.
These types of things actually used teenagers in their marketing for a reason. Preteens looked up to teenagers and wanted to be "cool" like them, so if they saw a teen in an ad, they'd want the product in order to be seen as cool. I don't think any actual teenager of the time would get this.
@@MartinGiadrosich I was surprised to hear these came out in 2003, I thought they cane out sometime between 1999 and 2001 because I remember seeing ads for these, but I can't imagine I would have watched any programs the ads would have run on when I was 13. I thought it was interesting from a technical standpoint but had no desire to own one. Of course with Web 2.0 just a few years away, it''s almost comical with hindsight to think they ever stood a chance.
I was in the 6-7 range when I got mine as a kid and I loved it, but looking back I know it's dogshit LMAO I still have it in a box somewhere.
@@MartinGiadrosich Same with Nerf. Teens aren't gonna run around shooting each other with Nerf guns pretending to be some military heroes, but seeing them in the ads sure got me to beg for them as a little kid.
I had the XP version! I had access to two computers, a TV, and a portable DVD player. At the time I was 8 and got it simply because I had a budding interest in tech and loved getting my hands on whatever tech toys I could get my little rural hands on lol
I remember having the color version of this *and* the XP version. The XP model came with "bonus features" for certain discs that included a game (usually just a basic trivia game) and a scene select feature.
Yeah, I don't remember the quality being bad
@@Karmy. as a kid there was nothing else like it that was affordable. There were portable DVD players but they were expensive and kinda fragile. It usually came with a carry case, but a kid could easily drop it and break it
I remember the VideoNow fondly. When I was little, my sister and I got the first VideoNow, and then a couple years later, the VideoNow Color, and after that, the VideoNow XP. We always took those and our GameBoy Advanced SP’s with us on road trips. Crazy to think that the same device I’m watching this video on has replaced the two technologies, I’ve referenced here.
What's the second technology? 'Cause dedicated handheld gaming devices are still very much a relevant thing.
@@CoralCopperHead Replaced was a pretty strong word. Handheld gaming is still alive with the switch, but seeing an increase in gaming on a phone is incredible.
Looks pretty cool tbh. I would've loved this as a child in the 2000's
Apparently, GBA video cartridges started coming out exactly a year after this thing launched. Seems like the far superior option, especially if you were savvy enough to be using flash carts back then. They weren't exactly uncommon at the time.
gba video was its own format with a shit ton of compression. most stuff ran at like 10 fps or less. it was short lived becouse it came out late in the gba life and a year later the psp was out with way higher quality movies. umd movies had a short but good run with tons of titles. if sony made a stand alone player it probably would have ran longer,
@@gogereaver349 I wasn't talking about the PSP. I was talking about this specific video format, VideoNow.
Thanks though.
@@gogereaver349 or a better PSP
I fell into the trap of thinking I could relive the satisfaction of a toy I had as a kid. I bought the 1970s Kenner "Give A Show Projector" off auction and was *really* disappointed in the quality of the images it projected. Lesson learned. Enjoy the memories of that old toy. You'll never get them back as an adult.
When you're a child your imagination fills in the gaps, when your an adult your cynicism sees them all :)
at least the old Gameboy is still fun to play, I still pull mine out for some picross every once in a while
LEGO and Thomas collectors win on that regard 🤣
@@ravenmadd1343 Haha, true! Although it also depends on if the technology is new. If you know there is another device that's better, even if you're a kid, your brain stops "filling in the gaps," and dreams of the better thing.
I did this with gooey louie. As a kid, it was one of my favorites. Bought a retro version of it as an adult to play with some of the kids in the family.
Being an adult made the repetative fake sneezing noise unbearable.
I bought one of these when I was a kid when they first came out! The video quality didn't matter to me, watching spongebob while riding the bus home from school was awesome! I remember I bought it with the money I had saved up from helping my grandmother. Such a wonderful memory
How did you keep it from skipping? I couldn’t go a mere 20 seconds on my bus with one. Ended up just asking for a portable DVD player the next holiday with gifts came around plus added in some earned money. Much better investment especially for the YA and teenage market they were pushing this for.
@@Just.A.T-Rex Spend some skill points and unlock Gyroscopic Hands. It's a good perk.
@@Just.A.T-Rex must've grown up in an area with better maintained roads, haha.
Yeah people forget there weren't cell phones or video mp3 players back then. Being able to pull something out of your pocket and watch a video was a big deal, regardless of the quality.
Like he said at the end, it's perfectly fine for what it is.
And I think that's the thing, most kids wouldn't care about the video quality by much as long as they were amused and distracted while in the vehicle, which the latter made adults, particularly adults happy that they didn't have kids whining and complaining and asking are we there yet every 2 seconds.
One of my most cringe memories from my childhood was having my heart set on getting a JuiceBox - a c. late 90s/ early 00s portable video player aimed at kids, with proprietary cartridges that played about 40 minutes of low framerate colour kids tv shows. You could get clips for the cartridges to carry them around, and the JuiceBox itself came with a screen that flipped around so you could stand the player up and watch it hands free.
Anyway, the cringe part of this story comes from hindsight. When my mum took me out one day after school to go get my JuiceBox from Argos, we first went into a GAME store to see if they had it - they didn’t, but the salesman upon being told what the device was instead advised that we get a PSP (PlayStation portable). My mum turned to me and said “do you want a PSP instead?” and I said no 🙃
I had the juice box 🥲 it was terrible!
Oh dear, mistakes were made that day haha. I guess we've all done it though
I've got a similar story from when I got my second phone as a kid. I had the choice between a Samsung SGH-F480 and the first iPhone. I chose the Samsung because the listing said it had games and the iPhone didn't...
Poor thing. The PSP would have been amazing.
I audibly and unintentionally said "nooooo" when I got to the end of your story
Dang
As a late 2000s to early 2010s kid, I would have loved the idea of this. My very own video player! And then I would have been bored with it after a few plays and tossed it in a drawer for the next decade, only to find it now in 2022 and go "oh yeah, that was kinda neat!"
By late 2000s these were obselete and you woulda had iPods
@@kennypowers1945 If you were poor like we were, you wouldn't have an iPod, you'd have a second-hand mp3 player. Or you'd go over to someone's house to use their ps2 or ps1. Though TBH I think most people just listened to music at home on CD players. Tape was still around as well, but most players played both.
I'm glad I grew up with regular DVDs and I've owned a few DVD players throughout my life, including the one I have now.
Or just nothing like me
@@kennypowers1945 ipod didn't do video until like the 4th gen.
I remember seeing the commercials for these and thinking that it was a cool concept. I always thought it was aimed at young children age 4 to 13 from the advertising. Using teenagers to represent how "cool" the product was was a tactic used to sell little kids on a product around that time. If you think about it, you wouldn't want to give your child a expensive gaming handheld.
as a kid I remember seeing the commercials and thinking how dumb of a concept it was, I was like "why would I ever want to waste my allowance on something that can only play in black and white when I can just rent the DVDs from my library and watch them on the big screen at home"?
The Gameboy Advanced SP was 99.99 dollars and a much higher quality device around the same time. Same price as the original Gamboy from 1989. Technically less based on Inflation.
@@alaskanhybridgaming yes, but games were, $$20-40, not $5
@@JohnKelly2 I know but the game library was amazing and much more support than whatever this thing was. You were still better off buy a portable DVD player than buying one of these devices.
@@alaskanhybridgaming the cheapest portable DVD player in 2004 was $200. Plus DVDs we're $40+.
Were you alive in 2004?
it's so weird seeing stuff I distinctly remember from my childhood on this channel. I actually really wanted one of these, but I never actually got one. Grandparents actually ended up getting me another format that was around at the time, a Juice Box, and wow I remember it being way worse than this. It was way less successful. The videos actually came on little cartridges and I just remember being extremely unimpressed. It would be interesting to see a video about that on this channel, because it's probably even more obscure. I remember both of them littering thrift stores for years afterwards.
Wow, there was something even worse? That's almost hard to believe!
They only got like 2 or 3 cartoons on those max
Same, but my sisters got the juice boxes.
I bought myself one of those 75-in-1 devices that was actually better
The weird thing for me was recognizing that Fisher-Price record player even though it predates me.
Actually?
I had one of those Fisher Price record players when I was a kid, the 'records' are surprisingly beefy. They made _exceptional_ throwing weapons for use against one's siblings. 😏 My god... 80x80 pixels and 15fps... I'm amazed they sold _any_ of these things. That is utterly freakin' abysmal! Even your average ten-year-old in the early aughts had higher standards than that!
@@belliduradespicio8009 idk, as someone who had an original Game Boy in 1989, I still would've laughed at them trying to sell these things at the time. But yeah, now? Stuff like this would never, _could_ never, exist.
@@Bakamoichigei Especially since there were GBA Video Cartridges
@@Flashcardsinfo That's for the GBA, but yeah.
I had one of those toy record players as a little one in the 90s - I thought it was so cool and blame things like that for why I repair phones and mess with electronics now lmao
I’m in awe with how recognizable everything is at 80x80
I'll never forget the first time I saw one of these. It was the summer of '03, and I was chilling at a friend's house for the weekend during my summer vacation. He had gotten a brand new cellphone and wanted to show it off to everybody. As he was showing everybody the functions of his new phone, I saw one of these sitting beside his charging cable and asked what it was. He demonstrated how it worked, and I spent the last hour or so binging Spongebob Squarepants. He noticed how enamored I was with this old tech and asked if I wanted to buy it off him for $20. I grew up pretty damn poor, and any and all allowance money/B-Day money I could've saved went towards this. I bought it a month later after begging my dad for permission and I cherished it ever since. Up until it was stolen from a kid in my neighborhood...
The “worst ever” format of something are always the most interesting ones :)
Let me just say as a kid when these came out this thing felt magical
Being able to watch television shows anywhere was a revolution despite it not being very good at all actually.
The color one a year later was much better.
Even as a kid, why would you even bother. Its such utter junk. Portable DVD players existed at the time and are actually useful.
@@simontay4851 Because it was marketed towards children, and parents might be afraid of what all their kids could watch on a standard DVD player.
@@simontay4851 they also cost 4x what the video now cost at the time for one without a battery and 6-8x for one with a rechargeable battery that lasted about two hours.
So I could either
A.) Get a video now for $40 on sale
And discs for $8 a piece
Or
B.) Spend $300-$400+ for a decent portable DVD player and $30 for movies.
Which do you think was more viable for a twelve year old?
@@simontay4851 Watching this video, I have never been more glad that my parents got me a proper portable DVD player for Christmas over this piece of junk.
I remember seeing the video now as a kid, while having the GBA spongebob/pokemon cartridges and thinking "wow what a waste, my gameboy plays games AND i can watch timmy turner on it!"
I definitely remember the TV ads for this as a kid here in the States, they certainly did a good job making it look way better on TV than it did in reality, holy crap!
I had the Video Now Color when I was younger. It was honestly revolutionary for it's time. As one of the younger siblings growing up I rarely had say over the tv so the video now was the perfect media for watching what you like on your own accord
You would have been better off with a portable VCD player, which was cheaper than a portable DVD player, but worlds better than the VideoNow players.
@@ThexthSurvivor yeah, but with 8 kids in the family we were poor
@@isaiahmcclure8894 I see. Well at least we all have better now. :)
Crazy I remember a birthday party at my elementary school and being sooo jealous because my classmate got one. It just feels so unreal seeing how much stuff the ipod and iphone wiped out.
Fond memories for sure. I had both the B&W and then later the color version. It was definitely a special toy for me as a kid since I saved up my own money to buy them. Spent many hours watching it secretly in bed when I was supposed to be asleep. Simpler times.
I remember getting the first model for christmas, and I only ever had the sample disk that came with it. I always wanted more videos but I could never afford them, so I was stuck watching the Band Geeks episode from Spongebob over and over and over 😂
SAME! It was that and an Amanda show disc for me lol
I can quote that entire episode to this day 😂😂😂
Same shit happened to me lmao, thankfully band geeks was a killer SpongeBob episode 😂😂
I had band geeks, and an episode of shark week.
That was a good episode. Ha ha
When it comes to electronics/audio equipment this channel is always the most fun and has influenced me more than any other.ive been busy lately so I've got some catching up to do.i want to thank you for all the great/interesting content🔥
There was also the PSP in 2004 which was probably the best way to watch media on the go at that time since it also played games and had a decent screen. Now our smartphones can do it all and we just take it for granted these days but looking back just makes me appreciate how good we have it now.
Oh man I loved my PSP! I used to watch movies on it all the time
Agreed u mean the first gen psp, before the go and vita right ?
Cause i never forget those cute discs to watch movies xD they even had some bangers cause sony owned many movie rights.
Like i got the psp 2000 or 3000 i need to check it out.
Hack ur og psp so u can watch most movies these days on it.
I used to watch so much pornog on my psp when I was in middle school lol
I remember my older brother telling me he watched a movie on a friends psp at school and i was like HOW
@@BDSbowling psp was awesome
omg what a throwback, a family member who is into retro tech gave me one years ago because he found it on a second hand store and couldn't do much with it, with some digging I found a weird plugin for a programthat let me convert video into the format this uses and I was able to record it onto normal cd-rs (and then cut the excess so it fit) it was really funny tbh it had no DRM at all
When they first came out, I remember getting a special Kool-aid branded VideoNow player with a koolaid logo on the front of it. I think it was one of those things where you bought it with the koolaid points off the packages or something. I loved that darn thing, and I think I still have it stored away somewhere. Now Band Geeks is permanently etched into my brain.
Sweet sweet sweet victory yeah!
bruh
I had a video now as a kid and I didn’t notice the screen being bad. In my memory it was amazing. Seeing this through a grown up lense is one thing, but as a kid this product was awesome.
Just a note: It is possible that the backlight of the device is not what we are used to. I mean, maybe when he was new, the screen would have a brighter backlight, and over the years it's been fading. There is a type of backlight that I don't remember the name of [edit: its called EL-lamp/"high field electroluminescent"/Electroluminescent Lamp], but it is a sheet that contains some chemical things, and when a certain electric current passes through it, it lights up. This has been used a lot in the past (it's present in the Akai S1000 sampler for example, and if you look for an akai s1000 today, you won't find it with a working backlight) even if you don't use it, over the years this chemical reaction gets null, and will not produce light.
I believe that this was chosen in options that would not physically fit an LCD with CCFL backlight, because every time I opened a display that used this chemical reaction system, it was not simple or easy to make a mod to use ccfl, since there is no space behind of the display (which makes the whole set thinner and lighter)
I mean, it's not -bad-, but my childhood portable DVD player that was brought for me instead of one of these definitely holds up better
It was litteraly an option to buy a light that goes on it to see it in the dark
2004 seems like a foreign country, it's really hard to remember what I was doing then. I was in my teens, so I remember vaguely being curious about the video now player from a technical perspective, but enough to actually fork over that much money just to stick the disk into my CD-ROM, because that is exactly what I would've done with it
All I remember from 2004 was playing Sly Cooper 2 in the Target demo consoles
It is basically a different country at this point. There were still white people so things were good.
The mid-2000's were the era of tacky shite. Yet, if you owned any of it, you were the coolest kid in your street. Good times.
The problem is tech was accelerating at an enourmous rate, It was a case of throw what ever mud you could at the wall and hope some of it sticks.
@@johntrevy1 It was also the era of the Nintendo DS - arguably the greatest hand-held device ever.
@@brookewestonctc Some mud sticks, like I said.
Good job there's absolutely no tacky shite on the market today.
So many weird tech dead-ends, especially in music and video storage. Flash storage made so much of these weird portable formats obsolete.
Man I didn't realize how out-of-the-loop I was as a kid. All I wanted was DVDs, an occasional LEGO set, and maybe a Blue's Clues or Dora toy. VideoNow doesn't connect to me at all, even though I was only a bit under the age range of this toy in its "prime." Kinda goes for most toys I WAS in the target audience for, too, though. I was a boring kid 😂
Lol this is the comment I relate to most on this vid so far. I don’t think I was boring for it though; I think I was just blessed with a really good TV & satellite cable as a kid, so the concept of this product just never appealed to me when I could either 1) play games on my GameBoy Advance or 2) remember the episodes pretty vividly & in color lol.
As kids we weren't going to be exposed to every product that we were the target demographic for. Plenty of things that passed me by. This was pre-internet (well not completely - but before the internet was what it is now) so information didn't spread so quickly nor as widely
AFAIK, the b&w model wasn't released in Europe, hence the "VideoNow" name for the color model. In US it was called "VideoNow Color".
VideoNow Jr. used its own flexible(!) discs, btw. They were bendable to prevent kids breaking them.
There was also a VCamNow camera intended to shoot the videos to be recorded onto PVD discs later (a copy of VideoNow Media Wizard was included with it).
I remember there also being a PVR. I believe it was named TV Now?
I had the VCamNow and loved it! Was a surprisingly compact cheap little video camera for the time. I'm sure the quality was probably 240p 15FPS at best lol.
@KitJames "ChatNow", without "V"
I remember buying the colour version of this for my son. But it wasn't anywhere near as cheap here in Australia as you've discussed. I believe I paid ~$125 for the player without any discs bundled.
The discs were ~$30 which was the price of an actual DVD. So we got him 3 when we purchased the player and after seeing not only the poor quality but the exceptionally short run time on the batteries (which you didn't cover), we didn't buy anymore discs. It made more sense just to buy normal DVDs.
If the discs had actually been $8 that would have been different.
Sounds about right price wise. But it's been a long time.
30 plus years and we're still getting shafted on video game prices
@@davemeads859 not really, it’s been $60 for a very long time, at least since the 90s. Considering the complexity and the increased cost of making the games, it should have increased by a lot, But $60 is the standard.
@@Sgt_Recka In Australia it's normal for games to be $90-$120 rather than $60. I've never seen a new game release at $60.
@@kisukebomb3750 because a Australian dollar in only worth 2/3 of the euro
I remember when I was a kid I got some Super Soaker rocket toy that would use water pressure to shoot the rocket up into the air. It was recalled due to safety concerns and I got one of the original black and white VideoNow players and a bundle of various discs as compensation. I used it a ton and loved it, but eventually about a year later my family got a portable DVD player so it wound up just gathering dust.
I think i got shot in the eye with one of those as a kid before they got recalled... Hurt like hell lmao
I had one of those rockets, I eventually cracked it by putting too much pressure in. Good toy that.
@@overbese Agreed, same.
That was a real recall?!?
Same thing happened to me! Initially I believed my parents on the recall but after a few years I became skeptic that they just thought the rocket was dangerous, returned it, and bought the videonow for me to pass time.
B/W version. Blue like the video. Came with case and I think headphones. Also came with spongebobs band geeks episode (iirc this was a single episode demo disk of some kind) and then a fairly oddparents disk, which had the episode “information stupor highway”
The same story with me getting one of these.
I miss that water rocket.
I remember having something along these lines. But I remember distinctly it having a larger and color screen.
I think the context really is part of what sold the VideoNow, the whole idea of massively portable video was a huge novelty and something media nerds like 10 year old me had wanted for forever.
I remember finding a watchman in my mom's closet and was like why the fuck didn't you tell me you had this lol. I could watch cartoons in the woods it was life changing lol
My first time seeing a gameboy play a Fairly Odd Parents video my mind was blown away.
@@wrthgdrver710 yup my buddy got avatar on his Nintendo ds it was insane
I was happy in the 70s when Sony came out with the walkman and I could listen to music recorded on cassette tape.
I’d get an ipod video
You have unlocked a memory for me, I remember in 2005 (when I was 9 years old) my mum got me the VideoNow as a birthday present. Safe to say, the screen was tiny and the main purpose was to watch a few SpongeBob episodes, it used to skip a lot too.
I wanted one of these when I was a kid, but my parents bought me a regular portable DVD player instead. looking back, I'm glad they got me that instead.
They definitely did you a HUGE favor by getting you a REAL portable DVD player instead of a VideoNow.
I hope you were grateful and didn't pout about it lol😂
@@franktruth9639 I was actually quite happy with it even when I first got it. The household had thousands of DVDs so I was happy I could play all that on it lol
@@linus607 Well that's good to hear you weren't a spoiled brat. I just remember how back in the 2000s the technology used to look so appealing and futuristic (especially to a kid), and the VideoNow definitely LOOKED cool, but it was hot GARBAGE in reality....meanwhile a portable DVD player might have LOOKED boring to a small child, but it is a much better gift.
@@franktruth9639 for sure. I remember it being a boring grey colour, but it had a much bigger 7 inch display and I remember the picture quality being "good" (for the time anyway.. LCD technology has definitely come some ways since then). Picture quality was definitely way better than the Video now though! One feature I loved about it is the RCA input. I could connect my Nintendo 64 to it and play it on that. Was really cool.
Yeah my parents just decided to buy me my own flat screen TV and DVD player.
nice optical illusion at 2:43 where SpongeBob moved to the left while nudging the video player to the left side 😆.
This kind of thing seemed more common in the 90's, the predatory marketing of substandard electronic devices to children. Back in the 70's and 80's when I grew up, we mostly used older devices that were made for adults (tv's, stereos, radios, etc.) when they upgraded to newer and better models.
And that's what seems to happen now, so it's come full circle.
One thing I remember about the 70s and 80s is that 'upgrading' an electronic device seemed like a lifetime, we wernt poor but still made things last. I was well grown up before being able to afford the next best thing and upgrade on a whim. An ugly old TV only got replaced when it went 'on the blink' even then most people I knew, parents had them repaired. Renting was a big thing, but don't know how they faired.
@@mick8473 you're right. My parents had the same little National TV from before I was born until well into my teens. "Upgrading" wasn't so much of a thing for most people. Also, it was easier to get stuff repaired.
Growing up in the 90's we had one 80's Goldstar TV and a basic sharp VCR. They were frequent visitors to the appliance repair shop, yet had less faults than the Loewe TV/VCR/DVD set we had in the 2000's.
Except in the case of that Corgi Movie Vision Mat showed a while ago😅
The 80x80, 4bit, 15fps format is probably the maximum they could do really cheaply because that will fit on the disc without any kind of compression - just throw the data from the disc on the LCD.
That makes sense. At 25 minutes that works out to just under 70 MB of video data, which would fit on a 8.5 cm CD. The fact that the player also doesn't feature any shock protection suggests that they put the absolute bare minimum amount of electronics in there.
I was thinking of xvid and like for encoding, but that cost computing power and licensing costs on 50$ device would likely be good percentage...
@@Astfgl Well that's always been Tiger Electronics MO to sell old tech, or slightly old tech in fancy packaging at rock bottom prices to kids with big marketing budgets. It sure did get a lot of us late 80's, and early 90's kids to get our parents to buy us their crappy LCD games for $15 - $20 a pop, along with a wack ton of AA batteries which never came with the product, of which I'm sure made those battery companies happy LOL!
I think there was some free space. I forget the details but I messed with a videonow disc once and decoded it and i think they're wasting like 1/4 of the space (1 byte out of each 4 byte 16 bit stereo sample). But whatever they were doing was probably just computationally simpler, but 160x80 or something would've been a _huge_ jump in quality.
That’s even less resolution than a commodore 64
This video was just recommended to me through the algorithm and I can’t tell you how shocked I was when you opened on that fisher price record player. I bought that exact toy a couple years ago for $15 on a thrift app because I like vintage toys, it still works and has all the records still! I’m only 22 I didn’t know that toy was that old! Really blew my mind lmao. Definitely checking out more of your vids
23 here and I have vivid memories of playing with that toy and trying to figure out how it worked. Pretty amazed it’s that old too. Guess it was a hand me down.
24 here lol I had this at 7 years old in 2005 and I tell you what I remember watching
I got a big nostalgia hit when he said fischer price record player... but my fischer price record player actually played real records.
You’re a true enthusiast and a professional for choosing to document the brand new VideoNow instead of keeping it, thank you so much techmoan
I remember working at Walmart when the Video Now Color came out. It was $75 & a portable DVD player was $100. I couldn't believe that $25 more meant you could just play all the movies you had at home.
I have to be brutally honest here. I loved this device as a kid. Sitting on the bus on the way to school watching this thing was a nightmare, as you said it was very prone to stuttering. Watching TV shows on long road trips was nice, but only in the day and using it as a "white noise machine" at night. The low quality wasn't the worst thing as watching normal television broadcasts at the time was about 240P for those that didn't own a High Definition TV. Owning one of these was nice as we couldn't really afford an iPod. Looking at it now makes me sad to see the golden age of my childhood was all just smoke and mirrors of the tech companies just trying to make a buck. Great video though. Kudos and you just earned another subscriber. Keep up the great work.
Actually most programs were broadcast in 480i, not 240p, but on a screen thay size it didn't matter as much.
480i in NTSC regions like america and Japan, 576i for rest of the world, or 819i for some French TV stations.
Of course, none of this matters because the TV's were on avg 24 inch screen size well up until the early 2000s.
Oh yeah, I forgot about slow 50 hz PAL. ;)
Idk but have you ever used the psp video umds when I was young I remember watching Spiderman like 100 times one road trips or when the power went out
i completely agree as kid who never got a adsl before 2011(i'm 1996)...tbh i call crazy parents who buy iPod and go on to their kids being brutally honest too.
it is good, for the target.
as i like to say i had always used crappy pcs and stuffs until i found my real first job then invest my money in my mac mini...my first pc was a crappy vista desktop.
even if people used XP i was still using a 98 using phone as adsl.
this is amazing, for the target and the price...surely would be better a fully dvd player with just a crappy display(surely) but still to me makes sense.
Some of those GBA video carts can get pretty bad in quality. Especially the double feature ones that have to sacrifice pretty much everything for longer runtime. Not quite as bad as this 80x80 monochrome video though. Of course, the trade-off there is sound quality which is quite bad on GBA unless you are using a Play-Yan Micro's pass through or some such.
Which is a bit ironic. These discs have the ROM space for quality, but the hardware is garbage. The GBA video carts have the hardware for quality, but the cartridge limits the ROM and now it has to decompress the video cutting further quality.
The GBA Video carts were 32 MB for two episodes. It’s a shame Hasbro didn’t license the same tech. They could’ve had much higher quality with those 500 mb discs
One of the most impressive things about gameboy video is that they somehow managed to cram the entirety of Shrek 2 into a single GBA cart
@@mrb692 Don't forget that awful Shark movie with Will Smith 🤢
@@Dave01Rhodes They also put 3 movies on that format (64MB with 1 movie per cartridge).
I had this as a kid and watched Band Geeks on repeat. I never thought I’d see this thing again and never knew how bad it actually looked as a kid, the only part that bogged me was the lack of color
I remember thinking how cool this was when I was a kid, although I don't think I ever used a Video Now. My family went for laptop-style portable DVD players and I remember vividly watching Star Wars and National Treasure with my brother on our way to whatever camp site we would be staying at. I ended up using one of the DVD players as a monitor for my camera, since it had an AV in/out port and the display was surprisingly useful for that.
I remember seeing the commercials for these in my later childhood years and was pretty impressed... For about 5 minutes until I remembered that portable DVD players existed and were already reasonably priced for most families by the time the color model came out.. LOL
They also had small antenna TVs the size of a gameboy color in the early 2000's.
@@hzy2k964 they had those in early 90's, maybe even in the 80's. we had one. it was black and white and the channels were limited but it worked pretty well.
@@RaptorNX01 Techmoan has a video on handheld TV's 😃
Do you remember the model or brand you owned?
I got a VideoNow Color for Christmas as a kid, and I loved it. I remember it coming in a box rather than a plastic package, and I also got episodes of Spongebob, Jimmy Neutron, and the Star Wars discs shown in the video. I'm pretty sure the discs came with the box. I would rewatch those discs over and over. It's wild to think how personal video media players were such a crazy idea back then, while now I can stream nearly any show on my phone.
It's crazy that less than 10 years later, you could watch video in far better quality on an even more portable device. The smartphone.
You can watch 4k@60 on a >10 inch screen tablet
I had one of the VideoNow Color players and as a young kid it was really cool, but looking back wow was it terrible. We did anything back then to try to get tv shows with us on road trips. Eventually we ended up getting a mini tv with a VHS player built in and put it on a stand in our mini van. That was a much better experience.
My cousins had a setup like that. Brought in the N64 too! You haven't lived until you've played 4-way split screen on a 9" screen on a road trip
Spoiled kids, when I was young we had the pleasure of listening to what was ever on the crappy car radio and the privilege of looking out the window on car trips. 😆
Besides the need for cheaper components that consume less power, I'm sure the main constraint that led them to use a low-res display was the amount of data that could fit on the small discs.
I remember getting the XP from my dad when I asked him to buy me a Gameboy. The confusion stems from its shape and the fact that we didn't know a lick of English with us being immigrants and all that. However, I did enjoyed the XP because that's all we had.
Did your pop ever learn English? If so, have you ever reminded him and all of you had a good laugh at his confusion? Bless his heart for his good intentions, though🙂
>However, I did enjoyed the XP because that's all we had.
Wholesome ngl
@@customfantasyhotwheels sorry for the very late reply. Nope he never got around to it. Living in California makes it too comfortable to not learn English because there is a huge Vietnamese community there. Also he did picked up a lot of English, when born near the end of the Vietnam war but he forgot most of it. However, simple sentences and words he can understand.
@@loulou3676 yeah my dad would surprise me on my birthdays with a few discs and two chocolate candy bars lol.
I'm actually pretty surprised by how much less awful it is than I expected it to be. I saw these as a gimmick at the time, but I had the benefit of being a teenager who had already begged for a real portable DVD player for christmas.
I remember getting the XP model and the disc burning software on deep clearance and having fun making my own music video discs (would have been in my late 30s then). From what I remember doing research on modifying standard cd-rs (I never bothered, seemed like too much trouble) the VideoNow discs read from the outside toward the center which is the reverse from standard cd and dvds.
Are there any rewritable discs?
I remember seeing ads for the VideoNOW back in the day either on TV or gaming magazines. I have always felt that it was just a gimmick, and never bothered with it. Also, already had a Gameboy Advance at the time, and felt that GBA Video was going to be more worth it. I personally chose some GBA Video carts, but ultimately it was the cost of actual portable DVD players becoming more affordable and phones being able to watch videos that ended both VideoNOW and GBA Video carts.
Imagine going back to the 1920s and showing the pioneers of television what was possible 80 years later with this device. They'd have been so thoroughly disappointed.
Imagine believing they're telling us the truth about hiStory.
@@telx2010 Why would "they" lie to us about history?
@@telx2010 lemme guess: the earth is flat, moon landings were a hoax, and television is a lie, there are actually little aliens inside your TV pretending to be a video signal
Impressed with the small size, but disappointed with the content.
They actually tried to make such machine, recording low res video onto disc, analog disc of course. It was called phonovision.
The PSP also came out in 2004
I worked at Wal Mart when this thing launched and we got a lot of parents trying to return these because they either didn't know what they were buying or they found that the discs were much easier for kids to scratch up than DvDs. Also, by this point wal mart did have a bin full of older DvDs for $5 and dollar public domain discs existed, so this wasn't even that cheap when you included the price of discs.
I ended up just spending $100 getting my younger brother and sister a portable DvD player so they could play the discs they already owned on a colour 8 inch screen and they were much happier than their friends with Videonow and they kept using that player for over a decade while videonow was dead a year or two latter.
It was a fad.
I think you could buy an actual portable DVD Player at the time starting at 70 to 100 dollars. I guess that competition crushed it 😄
im looking at some old bestbuy ads and portable dvd players were more like 250-800 when this released. and by late 2004 they were around 140-400.
@@bookshelffury I was a kid at the time, so your source is probably more accurate
The only reason why I was ever interested in Videonow after being a kid was because it contains some of the only merchandise of My Life as a Teenage Robot you can find. Such a mistreated show...
I absolutely hate that they cancelled that cartoon, and that they rejected the pitch for a reboot
@@wolfetteplays8894 All because of who lives in a pineapple under the sea.
@@BronzeBrawnIsCool honestly, that is so true. It was like the mid 2000’s that they were like “fuck it, we have the biggest multimedia franchise on earth, we don’t need to try anymore.” And then literally every other one of their shows was basically dead
@@wolfetteplays8894 Teenage Robot suffered the worst because it came out when Nickelodeon was promoting the first SpongeBob movie. They weren't gonna try anything new when they have something that was successful enough to keep them profiting.
Such a missed opportunity for toys
The quality is low, but, we need to judge it by the timing, back then, portable DVD players were $300-350, they were heavy for a kid to carry, and these were the main other option of watching videos, portable media players that supported video did not exist until these weren't made anymore, and the infrastructure to buy content for them didn't develop properly until about half a decade later, for the iPod video (Oct. 2005), a lengthy encoding was needed for any media that you wanted to play on it, that's not a good solution for something that kids could use, even if you ignore the 4-5x price.
I bought 2 of these for my kids on long trips - although they were color. I've never seen a B&W one. This was before DVDs were in cars and before they had portable players.. or at least ones that didn't cost an arm and a leg. They kept the kids occupied though with their own players and a few sets of shows!
Those other devices were around but yeah they were expensive. I guess if you had enough kids to fill a minivan you'd put a DVD player in the ceiling instead. It doesn't seem like something a kid would use on their own when they could just watch TV, and why take it with you to a park or playground just to sit there and watch videos? It seems like the market for this wasn't well thought out.
@@MrTaxiRob Amazing. When I was a kid we didn't need a tv in the car to be entertained. We read books or did word puzzles.
@@stopthephilosophicalzombie9017 Amazing. When I was a kid we didn't need books or word puzzles to be entertained. We were told to sit down and be quiet, and look out the windows so not to be car sick while our parents smoked with the windows rolled *up*
@@LateralTwitlerLT Lol.
@@MrTaxiRob Bought them for my kids. I had only two and the TV add-on for my minivan was $1000 while these were very cheap. Obviously if money was no object, these would never have sold. For most people, it is a factor.
I've never seen these in person so I can't be certain, but from this video I feel like the black and white version actually looks the best. I can see how that version could be practical for the time. The battery situation in the color one is particularly odd to me. It's like they were determined to use the same battery setup (maybe that would save money in manufacturing?) but found it was literally impossible so they had to quickly add another battery. I imagine that it doesn't last very long...which defeats the point of the whole "portable" thing.
also lol at "super bright screen"
I have the colour version and some SpongeBob discs, I somehow never realised it would be such good material for a techmoan video.
Was the screen always that bad or was techmoans just degraded?
@@apierc1 It was always that bad thanks to it being frontlit, but it's passable (at least colour-wise) if you get the contrast just right.
16:17 Literally just your typical ytp but in audiobook format.
Back in the mid 2000s, I remember seeing these in the store and thinking it would be cool to get one for traveling, even though DVD players were way better, whether they were held by the viewer or post-market installed into the vehicle (along with composite inputs I frequently used with my PS2) by someone else.
Also in 2005, the iPod Video (5G) debuted. 320x240, bright backlight, hard disk storage (though no optical disc playback).
Much more expensive and you could be sure that in teens hand it would break in like 2 weeks time.
But does it costs 50 dollar? No...
iPod costs way more and that is not what parent will buy it and give it to child (which chance child can damage it)...
Man I remember my older brother showing me a movie on his brand new ipod, it blew my mind! So tiny, but so clear- at least that’s how i remember it 😄
I had 2 of those. One was mine. The other one was thrown out of the school bus window as the bus was driving away after dropping me off and I went and picked it up and it still worked. As a kid it gave me the feeling of "omg I'm rich!" 😂
I actually prefer the black and white screen. It has a certain charm and the lack of colour helps everything look consistent (if bad). The colour screen is just barely good enough for me to start expecting it to be a proper screen and therefore I judge it more harshly.
Same.
Ditto
Early 2000s "5 crt black and white screens were really cheap even if they were all copy and paste with radio included
@@Techmoan I think the PXL-2000 probably had the worst format of any commercial product: video with no helical scanning recorded on audio tape! Pre-recorded titles weren't available, of course, but it was a format.
I was thinking the black and while screen looked better too