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!

@risotto7858

2 жыл бұрын

“You can smell the pixels”

@portalpat42

2 жыл бұрын

Hey Dank, love your videos! That's awesome, can't wait to see that brand new nug!

@robertsteel3563

2 жыл бұрын

The Dank is here everyone!

@notfunnydidntlaugh8621

2 жыл бұрын

"Can you believe no one bought this?"

@nabusvco

2 жыл бұрын

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!!!

@gierer797

2 жыл бұрын

and just like that a 22 minute episode becomes 44

@ddawsonwilsondawg7967

2 жыл бұрын

@@gierer797 INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE!!!

@ddawsonwilsondawg7967

2 жыл бұрын

@@gierer797 And just like that 22 likes will soon become 2200

@gamerguy425

2 жыл бұрын

LMAO, underrated comment!

@ddawsonwilsondawg7967

2 жыл бұрын

@@gamerguy425 Thank you!

There's something special about watching videos on low resolution screens. Like watching cutscenes on the DS felt magical.

@xylemphloem

5 ай бұрын

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

@casadilla111

4 ай бұрын

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.

@bmo14lax

4 ай бұрын

​@@xylemphloemyou can use that stuff in edits and all that for cool effects

@soyokou.2810

3 ай бұрын

It's because you were a kid and you have nostalgia glasses on

@EximiusDux

3 ай бұрын

@@soyokou.2810It 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.

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.

@JackFoxtrotEDM

7 ай бұрын

Which one?

@Lo-Sir

6 ай бұрын

I can imagine you seeing GBA Video quality

@JackFoxtrotEDM

6 ай бұрын

@@RepentandbelieveinJesusChrist5 lmao

@pinkrainmoon

6 ай бұрын

@@JackFoxtrotEDM i don't really remember, it was a dark blue one with color video

@corneliusthecrowtamer1937

Ай бұрын

I had a laptop

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.

@DecisionsRQuestionable

Жыл бұрын

you're father the man

@pongchannel.

Жыл бұрын

@@DecisionsRQuestionable facts

@Pacmau01

Жыл бұрын

Same here. My father got me portable DVD and after some time, SpongeBob Movies

@HowardLive

Жыл бұрын

That’s how you know your parents love you. 😉

@LWsquidwardIsOurSavior

Жыл бұрын

OKAY

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.

@gentuxable

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@litigioussociety4249

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@TechyBen

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@gentuxable

2 жыл бұрын

@@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).

@GraveUypo

2 жыл бұрын

pdas are just smartphones without the phone part. it's the same type of device.

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.

@josha254

Жыл бұрын

You were beaten, right?

@victoriasveil

Жыл бұрын

@@C88_Revy LMAOOOOOOO

@littlebigcommentary

Жыл бұрын

@@C88_Revy what a fuckin' legend lmfao

@raaymonf

Жыл бұрын

@@C88_Revy Bro, this is a prank! The prank:

@a_pullin

Жыл бұрын

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.

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.

@InfernosReaper

Жыл бұрын

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.

@Yeen125

Жыл бұрын

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.

@NotATube

Жыл бұрын

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.

@NotATube

Жыл бұрын

@@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).

@InfernosReaper

Жыл бұрын

@@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

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.

@TimSzabo

2 жыл бұрын

16:21 My favorite part XD

@goncaloduarte4683

2 жыл бұрын

It was released the same year as the PSP with the much superior UMD that played on the much superior screen of the PSP

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.

@deusexaethera

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@tcknapp1984

2 жыл бұрын

Cool story ....

@BokBarber

2 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@finalstarmandx6644

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@thomasmacdonough288

2 жыл бұрын

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

At 1.8 GB per disk you can fit an entire season of animation with the encoding tech today

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.

@Dyl_With_A_Cam

7 ай бұрын

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

@qffaffafaffrafrfraf

2 ай бұрын

I'm also 25 and got the colour version as a child. I thought it was incredible

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.

@mrlithium69

2 жыл бұрын

your profile pic is the same as the screen in this thing

@Bossix84

2 жыл бұрын

@@mrlithium69 :D

@ZephyrysBaum

2 жыл бұрын

@@mrlithium69 No, it's conway's game of life

@coolelectronics1759

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@cdoublejj

2 жыл бұрын

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

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

@QuackZack

2 жыл бұрын

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"

@lasarousi

2 жыл бұрын

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"

@ghhn4505

2 жыл бұрын

Can confirm. My only memory of using this thing was on a plane when I was four.

@servvo

2 жыл бұрын

proto ipad kid

@ShrimpinAintEasy

2 жыл бұрын

Heavy "riding to the waffle house an hour from home to get picked up by dad for weekend visitation" vibes

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.

@CadgerChristmasLightShow

7 ай бұрын

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.

@seva7500

7 ай бұрын

@@CadgerChristmasLightShowwhat? It just stopped working?

@anonUK

3 ай бұрын

​@@CadgerChristmasLightShow If it was miscalibrated, couldn't it be put back in place? Or if it was shot completely, replaced?

@CadgerChristmasLightShow

3 ай бұрын

@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.

@anonUK

3 ай бұрын

@@CadgerChristmasLightShow So your Dad just went back to the store and got a replacement under the warranty?

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.

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.

@jacktringoli3299

2 жыл бұрын

And then the iPhone came out lol

@richsackett3423

2 жыл бұрын

@@jacktringoli3299 No it didn't. Are you 12?

@SoulDevoured

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@verzionhorizon

2 жыл бұрын

@@richsackett3423 what? it did come out. Also whats with the already accusations of him being 12?

@gierer797

2 жыл бұрын

@@richsackett3423 first iphone came out in 2007

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.

@BeeTriggerBee

2 жыл бұрын

Also isnt it the whole premise of online piracy? lol

@user-nd7rd8jo6h

2 жыл бұрын

Haha right? Even I wasn't even allowed to trade GB games I bought with my own birthday money lol

@natela6787

2 жыл бұрын

@@user-nd7rd8jo6h even

@gold_spin1639

2 жыл бұрын

@@BeeTriggerBee well, with piracy you don’t lose whatever you’re giving. This would just be sharing/trading.

@gold_spin1639

2 жыл бұрын

I mean, when I was a kid I used to trade video games with other kids. The secret was to not tell your parents.

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

Жыл бұрын

By late 2000s these were obselete and you woulda had iPods

@Stettafire

Жыл бұрын

@@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.

@lovelydolltime8006

Жыл бұрын

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.

@beanman853

Жыл бұрын

Or just nothing like me

@gogereaver349

7 ай бұрын

@@kennypowers1945 ipod didn't do video until like the 4th gen.

It’s amazing how far technology has come. I don’t remember it looking that old. I LOVED it.

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.

@Just.A.T-Rex

2 жыл бұрын

Portable DVD players were out.

@ryan568

2 жыл бұрын

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

@herbie747

2 жыл бұрын

In the early 2000s there were Archos media players that were 50x better than these.

@fsfx

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@scottigertiger6430

2 жыл бұрын

@@Just.A.T-Rex how much ? Thats the point . This was affordable for parents to buy.

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.

@sock2828

2 жыл бұрын

I used to take it with me on family camping trips and it would skip horribly whenever we drove on a bumpy dirt road.

@HinaTan250

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@doorknob2150

2 жыл бұрын

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 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

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.

I remember seeing commercials for these but never knew anyone who had them. Thanks for the peek! :)

@trowwzers5057

2 жыл бұрын

I owned one and used it a lot during car rides. Mine also had color

@gregandcin

2 жыл бұрын

I think I might have one stuck in storage somewhere

@tmck4138

2 жыл бұрын

I had one with one episode of the fairly odd parents, but they were so expensive

@TheJadeFist

2 жыл бұрын

I remember the commercials vaguely, but I don't think I've ever seen one.

@TabboAmber

2 жыл бұрын

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 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.

@wb3213

Жыл бұрын

This comment made me 😊

@Thedudemannn

Жыл бұрын

Same ! I still have mine!

@Submersed24

Жыл бұрын

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

@raerae1630

Жыл бұрын

Plus it was something you worked towards and earned!

@thetechsavvy0153

8 ай бұрын

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 😂

This caught my attention and it's filled me with nostalgic memories from when I saw the commercials for it. I never got one of the four generation versions when I was a kid in my pre-teens, but I'm (unsurprisingly) glad that I never did because it would have been a problem for me to put up with the flaws they had that would have totally destroyed both the devices and the disks.

nice optical illusion at 2:43 where SpongeBob moved to the left while nudging the video player to the left side 😆.

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.

@pinksnowbirdie2938

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@Milamberinx

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@wx4newengland

2 жыл бұрын

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

@JayCAlan

2 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@LincolnRon

2 жыл бұрын

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.

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.

@JasonEngman

Жыл бұрын

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"

@CoralCopperHead

Жыл бұрын

The issue is it's not much cheaper than the higher quality solutions that were on the market at the time.

@b.w.5828

Жыл бұрын

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.

@pinktortue

Жыл бұрын

Agreed!

@VicGChad07

Жыл бұрын

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.

Man, the nostalgia with those commercials. Fantastic video, very well done!

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.

@gogereaver349

7 ай бұрын

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,

@snarkasticdouche3863

7 ай бұрын

@@gogereaver349 I wasn't talking about the PSP. I was talking about this specific video format, VideoNow. Thanks though.

@panduvandal

3 ай бұрын

​@@gogereaver349 or a better PSP

"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.

@moshikong3961

2 жыл бұрын

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).

@giggs-chan2004

2 жыл бұрын

Ash Ketchum: It’s like TV without the TV.

@davemeads859

2 жыл бұрын

You could get a tv antenna adapter for Sega's gamegear in the early 90s

@hectormugwump5530

2 жыл бұрын

You were in colour from the get go.

@kaylaa2204

2 жыл бұрын

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

The “worst ever” format of something are always the most interesting ones :)

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

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🔥

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.

@Colt45hatchback

2 жыл бұрын

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

@orangie8426

2 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@AFAndersen

2 жыл бұрын

As someone who has never watched Spongebob, I would agree that they are perfectly viewable, but a backlight might have helped...

@TheNugettinage

2 жыл бұрын

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

@Photo0021

2 жыл бұрын

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 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.

@RJRC_105

2 жыл бұрын

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

2 жыл бұрын

How did you manage to cut the cdrs to size using those tools without scratching or cracking rhe discs? Sounds tricky.

@WillOnSomething

2 жыл бұрын

@@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 :)

@straightpipediesel

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@dismissyourself

2 жыл бұрын

Damn I love this story.

“Does your video player have a super bright screen?” “No, it doesn’t.” LMAO 💀😭😭😭😭😭

The HitClips mentioning sent me through a time machine. Had forgot about them for YEARS, until they were mentioned in this video and then I started remembering all kinds of stuff from that time that had just been locked away somewhere in my mind for ages.

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!

@philollenberg

2 жыл бұрын

More time and effort than was put into sourcing better screen tech for the actual VideoNow devices. 😆😆

@darkcoeficient

2 жыл бұрын

Really? Where are the puppets? Jk

@erlendse

2 жыл бұрын

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!

@ryanhardcastle725

2 жыл бұрын

Don't forget the seamless edit at 4:14. Made me chuckle.

@darkcoeficient

2 жыл бұрын

@@ryanhardcastle725 had to do a double take on that one

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 :)

@Lauren_C

2 жыл бұрын

Even a quick glance at the transparent one screamed Jank.

@NEEDbacon

2 жыл бұрын

I legit misread Landscape as Landfill.

@graphichealer8161

2 жыл бұрын

WHAT!!! It's THE Ben Heck!!!

@johnalexander7490

2 жыл бұрын

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!

@madeintexas3d442

2 жыл бұрын

I was waiting for him to fix the speaker but that part of the video didn't happen on this one.

Video Now is Video Then.

@anunimportantaccount

6 ай бұрын

UNDERRATED

The fact I had these and the disks with so many different shows as a kid is another lost memory of my childhood regained thank you so much!

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.

@MartinGiadrosich

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@Alcofoamer

2 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@redinagan

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@nitroxylictv

2 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@Solaceon

2 жыл бұрын

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 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.

@xeno4665

2 жыл бұрын

Mee 2 duder

@samholdsworth420

2 жыл бұрын

😂 poor noobs

@jorisbonson386

2 жыл бұрын

Never buy proprietary crap...

@DacAttack2142

2 жыл бұрын

@@jorisbonson386 they made the purchase nearly 20 years ago and was most likely a child

@jorisbonson386

2 жыл бұрын

@@DacAttack2142 and?

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 😂

@Varooooooom

Жыл бұрын

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.

@rorz999

6 ай бұрын

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

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

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.

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.

@johntrevy1

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@brookewestonctc

2 жыл бұрын

@@johntrevy1 It was also the era of the Nintendo DS - arguably the greatest hand-held device ever.

@johntrevy1

2 жыл бұрын

@@brookewestonctc Some mud sticks, like I said.

@andreasu.3546

2 жыл бұрын

Good job there's absolutely no tacky shite on the market today.

@estherstreet4582

2 жыл бұрын

So many weird tech dead-ends, especially in music and video storage. Flash storage made so much of these weird portable formats obsolete.

I used to have one of those.... it was amazing when it was all you had in the car on a road trip... That was part of the nostalgia of the early 2000s for me. Everything was super new but you kinda had an excitement about what is to come. Also, as a kid, your mind is super imaginative, so I'm a big believer the less you see, the better, because your mind kinda filled in the blanks and that's what made it so nostalgic.

This videos been in my recommended for ages and now I finally decide to watch it.

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.

@jacksonteller3973

2 жыл бұрын

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"?

@alaskanhybridgaming

2 жыл бұрын

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

2 жыл бұрын

@@alaskanhybridgaming yes, but games were, $$20-40, not $5

@alaskanhybridgaming

2 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@JohnKelly2

2 жыл бұрын

@@alaskanhybridgaming the cheapest portable DVD player in 2004 was $200. Plus DVDs we're $40+. Were you alive in 2004?

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 🙃

@hindsonracing

2 жыл бұрын

I had the juice box 🥲 it was terrible!

@Colt45hatchback

2 жыл бұрын

Oh dear, mistakes were made that day haha. I guess we've all done it though

@eliasrenner555

2 жыл бұрын

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...

@TechyBen

2 жыл бұрын

Poor thing. The PSP would have been amazing.

@MyNewSoundtrack

2 жыл бұрын

I audibly and unintentionally said "nooooo" when I got to the end of your story Dang

Oh man, I remember seeing commercials for these and wanting one so much. All hand-held video game systems went through their own awkward video FMV phase.

"One of those files from the black and white disk sounds like this." ***hole opens in earth's core***

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.

@Di3mondDud3

2 жыл бұрын

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

@MajimaEnterprises

2 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@Dziugenonas

2 жыл бұрын

Or just let the kids play with toys.

@MrSpacelyy

2 жыл бұрын

@@jason_a_smith_gb any phone with vlc can do that.

@jareknowak8712

2 жыл бұрын

Respect for hacking kids toys! :) 👍

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.

@gorak9000

2 жыл бұрын

Wow, there was something even worse? That's almost hard to believe!

@kanna-san.

2 жыл бұрын

They only got like 2 or 3 cartoons on those max

@sand0decker

2 жыл бұрын

Same, but my sisters got the juice boxes. I bought myself one of those 75-in-1 devices that was actually better

@Khrrck

2 жыл бұрын

The weird thing for me was recognizing that Fisher-Price record player even though it predates me.

@nickpetrillo

2 жыл бұрын

Actually?

I remember these! My cousin and I only had the disc that held the SpongeBob episode, "Just One Bite." If you so much as bumped it (and as kids fighting over SpongeBob, that was quite common) it would skip everywhere. I'm not sure where it went, probably in a box somewhere as we parted and both went to college. I want to find it again just for the nostalgia, thank you very much for bringing me back to that time!

I just discovered this channel and you seem like a really friendly chap! And very intelligent with tech!

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

2 жыл бұрын

When you're a child your imagination fills in the gaps, when your an adult your cynicism sees them all :)

@vu1pix

2 жыл бұрын

at least the old Gameboy is still fun to play, I still pull mine out for some picross every once in a while

@GeohToy

2 жыл бұрын

LEGO and Thomas collectors win on that regard 🤣

@beartackle

2 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@marcush4741

2 жыл бұрын

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.

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.

My sisters and I shared one among the 3 of us! Watching this video brought back so many memories

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.

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

2 жыл бұрын

Imagine believing they're telling us the truth about hiStory.

@MrSpaceWhale

2 жыл бұрын

@@telx2010 Why would "they" lie to us about history?

@RCAvhstape

2 жыл бұрын

@@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

@drakefallentine8351

2 жыл бұрын

Impressed with the small size, but disappointed with the content.

@debranchelowtone

2 жыл бұрын

They actually tried to make such machine, recording low res video onto disc, analog disc of course. It was called phonovision.

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

@Just.A.T-Rex

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@verybland

2 жыл бұрын

@@Just.A.T-Rex Spend some skill points and unlock Gyroscopic Hands. It's a good perk.

@Toast_94

2 жыл бұрын

@@Just.A.T-Rex must've grown up in an area with better maintained roads, haha.

@Arjay82

2 жыл бұрын

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.

@morganrussman

2 жыл бұрын

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.

Certainly didn't think it looked that bad back in the day as many others have mentioned, and fond memories indeed. Thank you for the video!

Hey i had one! I remember sitting in the back of the car throwing up cause I was trying to concentrate on the tiny screen for so long 😂

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

Жыл бұрын

What's the second technology? 'Cause dedicated handheld gaming devices are still very much a relevant thing.

@edrew9975

Жыл бұрын

@@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.

@whatamievendoing

Жыл бұрын

Looks pretty cool tbh. I would've loved this as a child in the 2000's

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.

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah, I don't remember the quality being bad

@psilobom

2 жыл бұрын

@@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

1:12 OMG I REMEMBER HIT CLIPS it's been ages since I was reminded of their existence! lol

I had one of these 12 years ago and this was my only form of entertainment until 8 years ago, I’m 17. And I just bought a new one for nostalgia and the memories flooded in

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 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 one of the VideoNow color players! Man, it's wayyyy poorer quality than I remember. I had a few different disc sets. The one I watched the most was definitely the Discovery Channel "Dinosaur Planet" set which had three of the four episodes, each on its own disc. Loved the video, thanks for this blast from the past.

oh my gosh what a nostalgia trip this video was, remembering a toy i had completely forgotten about. i had the video now xp, that blue one at about 20 mins in, but i didn't get all the discs on the right. i know for sure i had the amanda show one, and i want to say a fairly oddparents as well. i remember having such a good time with it! it's gone now and i think that's for the best; i think trying it now would burst the nostalgia bubble

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.

@franktruth9639

2 жыл бұрын

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😂

@linus607

2 жыл бұрын

@@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

@franktruth9639

2 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@linus607

2 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@drummersnare6276

Жыл бұрын

Yeah my parents just decided to buy me my own flat screen TV and DVD player.

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 😂

@karekanol13

2 жыл бұрын

SAME! It was that and an Amanda show disc for me lol

@ryan568

2 жыл бұрын

I can quote that entire episode to this day 😂😂😂

@taylon5200

2 жыл бұрын

Same shit happened to me lmao, thankfully band geeks was a killer SpongeBob episode 😂😂

@captaintitusultramarine

2 жыл бұрын

I had band geeks, and an episode of shark week.

@willrice1050

2 жыл бұрын

That was a good episode. Ha ha

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!" 😂

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.

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

2 жыл бұрын

Even as a kid, why would you even bother. Its such utter junk. Portable DVD players existed at the time and are actually useful.

@tavshedfjols

2 жыл бұрын

@@simontay4851 Because it was marketed towards children, and parents might be afraid of what all their kids could watch on a standard DVD player.

@TheChrisRolla

2 жыл бұрын

@@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?

@Mr-Trox

2 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@CockroachMunchingKrabbyPatty

2 жыл бұрын

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!"

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.

@jeffreypike9725

Жыл бұрын

Sweet sweet sweet victory yeah!

@ssgpizzalover515

Жыл бұрын

bruh

I remember when I got a Gameboy Advance cartridge with some Cartoon Network cartoons on it. The two cartoons which me and my sister wore out the most were the Ed, Edd, N' Eddy episode and the Dexter's Lab episode. I think that Powerpuff Girls episode where they made a sister was on it too.

Yeah, I had a pocket television from Sharper Image and the picture quality was incredible. They were definitely going cheap with the Video Now player. Great share, thanks! 🙂👍

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.

@brettkelly9440

2 жыл бұрын

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

@wrthgdrver710

Жыл бұрын

My first time seeing a gameboy play a Fairly Odd Parents video my mind was blown away.

@brettkelly9440

Жыл бұрын

@@wrthgdrver710 yup my buddy got avatar on his Nintendo ds it was insane

@billp4

Жыл бұрын

I was happy in the 70s when Sony came out with the walkman and I could listen to music recorded on cassette tape.

@staringcorgi6475

Жыл бұрын

I’d get an ipod video

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.

@jeremyblackwater439

Жыл бұрын

Oh man I loved my PSP! I used to watch movies on it all the time

@justabunny999

Жыл бұрын

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.

@supahdupahplayahmacknumbah7791

Жыл бұрын

I used to watch so much pornog on my psp when I was in middle school lol

@BDSbowling

Жыл бұрын

I remember my older brother telling me he watched a movie on a friends psp at school and i was like HOW

@jeremyblackwater439

Жыл бұрын

@@BDSbowling psp was awesome

The fact i coild watch Spongebob (in any quality) while in the back of the car on a boring road trip was the greatest invention ever.

Basically the Z-4 flip the video now. That "DVD" player type thing my cousin had one. I loved that ish so much. That Texas Episode will Always always always be my favorite Episode of all time.

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!

@Bakamoichigei

2 жыл бұрын

@@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.

@Flashcardsinfo

2 жыл бұрын

@@Bakamoichigei Especially since there were GBA Video Cartridges

@waluigiwah5724

2 жыл бұрын

@@Flashcardsinfo That's for the GBA, but yeah.

@Zulf85

2 жыл бұрын

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

@infiniteplanes5775

2 жыл бұрын

I’m in awe with how recognizable everything is at 80x80

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.

@Porygonal64

2 жыл бұрын

I think i got shot in the eye with one of those as a kid before they got recalled... Hurt like hell lmao

@overbese

2 жыл бұрын

I had one of those rockets, I eventually cracked it by putting too much pressure in. Good toy that.

@ProlificInvention

2 жыл бұрын

@@overbese Agreed, same.

@alecmets2011

2 жыл бұрын

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”

@mrbloodmuffins

2 жыл бұрын

The same story with me getting one of these. I miss that water rocket.

When you showed the spongebob footage, my brain just colored it in for me because I’m so attuned to the colors.

This is great a video! Well constructed! That being said, I grew up in 90s, and I heard of these but never had one.

Ah the 2000s, a time when the marketplace for portable TV shows was effectively a free-for-all.

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 these. The commercials made them seem so radical, as everything was in the 90's.

I got one of these as a Christmas gift from my grandparents when I was about 10. It came pre-bundled with the SpongeBob episode "Band Geeks". Even though I wasn't the biggest SpongeBob fan back then I still enjoyed having it. I wanted to get more discs for it but they were so expensive that I never did...but I think the small screen and janky video quality didn't matter because back then the ability to be able to watch anything at all in a device this portable was so novel. This was back when normal DVD players still went for like $500 and the portable ones were even more expensive...so to be a kid with such portable access to videos like this...it made you feel like an absolute king. It was a massive statue symbol. Yes, time has caught up to the VideoNow and it's showing its age for sure, but I have nothing but fond memories of mine.

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

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

@Kmn483

2 жыл бұрын

All I remember from 2004 was playing Sly Cooper 2 in the Target demo consoles

@pyromcr

2 жыл бұрын

It is basically a different country at this point. There were still white people so things were good.

16:13 The loud, clipping, single channeled SpongeBob audio had me rolling. I wasn't expecting the file to sound that bad 😂

I remember these when they came out. I was the target age group but they never interested me. By the time the color one came out (or a later variant) I believe I got my first GBA Video cartridge and the novelty just wore off very quickly for me. Wouldn't surprise me if the same would have happened if I got one of these. I didn't know anybody who had one but I remember target, Walmart, and K Mart being over stocked with these including the juice box (can't remember if that was a competitor product or made by the same company). These were really a product of their time, I don't think you can relaunch something like this anymore even if you modernize it because we have parents throw tablets and phones at their kids to shut them up these days.