Nintendo Video
Nintendo Video is a service allowing owners of American, Japanese, and European 3DS's to download and watch various videos offered by Nintendo. Nintendo Video uses SpotPass to download videos, even when the Nintendo Video app itself is not running. Nintendo Video was discontinued March 31, 2014.
Eurosport is a service similar to Nintendo Video and allowing owners of European 3DS's to download and watch various videos offered by Eurosport. Eurosport was discontinued December 31, 2012.
Internet connection
To identify your 3DS's region and country, different URLs are requested by 3DS's from different countries. A URL contains a subdomain that's specific for your region (EU/USA/JP), a country code that's specific to your country, and a language code. Here's a table containing country codes and subdomains known so far and their corresponding file names:
| Country | Region subdomain | File name |
|---|---|---|
| EUR (Nintendo Video) | pubeu-p | ESP_MD |
| EUR (Eurosport) | pubes-p | EWP_MD |
| USA | pubus-p | ESE_MD |
| Japan | pubjp-p | ESJ_MD |
See http://www.wiibrew.org/wiki/Country_Codes for the country codes.
Language codes known so far:
| Language | Code | Region |
|---|---|---|
| Japanese | 0 | Japan |
| English | 1 | EUR/USA |
| French | 2 | EUR/USA |
| German | 3 | EUR |
| Italian | 4 | EUR |
| Spanish | 5 | EUR/USA |
| Netherlands | 8 | EUR |
| Portuguese | 9 | EUR/USA |
| Russian | 10 | EUR |
In all requests below, COUNTRYCODE should be replaced with your country's code, COUNTRYSUBDOMAIN should be replaced with your region's subdomain. FILENAME are also depends on the region and should be replaced correspondingly. LANGUAGECODE should be replaced by a desired language (by now most of the content are the same for all available languages, so one can use "1" as a most common).
Surprisingly, Nintendo Video uses plain unencrypted HTTP connection to transfer videos. When "connectivity check" button is pressed, Nintendo Video sends a following HTTP request to COUNTRYSUBDOMAIN.est.c.app.nintendowifi.net:
GET /1/COUNTRYCODE/LANGUAGECODE/CHECK HTTP/1.1
Host: COUNTRYSUBDOMAIN.est.c.app.nintendowifi.net
As you can see, no console-specific data is being sent. The server responds with either a 403 or 404 error code, where 403 means that user's region (determined by IP, I guess) doesn't match the region specified by COUNTRYCODE and COUNTRYSUBDOMAIN and 404 means that everything's OK.
If everything is OK with the region check, the 3DS proceeds to download videos. It seems that support for only four videos is hardcoded into Nintendo Video app, because it makes following requests (to the same server as the CHECK query):
GET /1/COUNTRYCODE/LANGUAGECODE/FILENAME1 HTTP/1.1
Host: COUNTRYSUBDOMAIN.est.c.app.nintendowifi.net
GET /1/COUNTRYCODE/LANGUAGECODE/FILENAME2 HTTP/1.1
Host: COUNTRYSUBDOMAIN.est.c.app.nintendowifi.net
GET /1/COUNTRYCODE/LANGUAGECODE/FILENAME3 HTTP/1.1
Host: COUNTRYSUBDOMAIN.est.c.app.nintendowifi.net
GET /1/COUNTRYCODE/LANGUAGECODE/FILENAME4 HTTP/1.1
Host: COUNTRYSUBDOMAIN.est.c.app.nintendowifi.net
FILENAME seems to return a 403 error if the user's region doesn't match, 404 if the video doesn't exist and the video itself otherwise. As of July 18th, 2011, only 1st and 2nd videos are available from UK IP addresses.
For Japan region /1/1/0/ESJ_CNF must also present on a server in order to play video files.
These videos can easily be downloaded from any computer with IP address that matches country specified by COUNTRYCODE, COUNTRYSUBDOMAIN and LANGUAGECODE using wget without any special settings. Videos are region-locked.
SD storage
Downloaded videos are stored in the SD card Extdata, from the decrypted SpotPass content payload. Country info is presumably stored in this metadata, region-lock is handled by the BOSS module via the programID in the payload header. At the end of the video file is a JPEG, which contains the video thumbnail, and various metadata in the EXIF including the URL associated with the video. The text shown on the web browser button is also stored in the EXIF.
All of these fields are big-endian? Structure of this SD data:
| Offset | Length | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 0x0 | 4 | Unknown, value is 0x18 |
| 0x4 | 0x14 | ? |
| 0x18 | 8 | TitleID of Nintendo Video |
| 0x20 | 0x8 | ? |
| 0x28 | 0x4 | Total filesize? |
| 0x2c | 0x2c | Unknown, some countries' videos have two extra words added here? |
| 0x58 | 0x20 | ASCII video ID? M<shortvidtitle>video ID |
| 0x68 | 0x20 | ? |
| 0x88 | 0x78 | UTF-16 video title |
| 0x100 | 0xc | ? |
| 0x10c | 0x190 | UTF-16 video description |
| 0x29c | 0x20 | Another ASCII video ID? I<shortvidtitle>video ID |
| 0x2bc | Video size | Mobiclip .moflex video data (first word here is little-endian magic number 0xABAA324C) |
File format
The SpotPass content downloaded for Nintendo Video uses the SpotPass content container format, see the SpotPass page for info on the container format. See the above SD storage section for info on the cleartext payload.
Region info is stored in the decrypted SpotPass crypto layer, see above SD section.
Server spoofing
In case you want to try messing with Nintendo Video, here's a description of what I did:
- Set up a DNS server using bind9, which returned my IP as the IP for pubeu-p.est.c.app.nintendowifi.net (bind config).
- Don't forget to replace MY_IP in config with your IP address, but don't replace the IP of conntest.nintendowifi.net service
- Set up an HTTP server using nginx and put ESP_MD1, ESP_MD2 (which I have downloaded from Nintendo's servers earlier, see above) in my /var/www/1/110/1/ folder.
- Configured my 3DS to use my DNS server as both primary and secondary DNS server.
- ???
- PROFIT!
This can be done with any DNS server and HTTP server, as long as you spoof everything correctly. It is possible on Windows. I have not tried Mac OS X.
Unfortunately, this currently has little use since Nintendo shut the services down. However, they can still be spoofed if you have everything still on your 3DS. Spoofing your own videos could be possible, but you can already do that with the web browser and something like Universal Media Server.