[caption id="attachment_1034" align="alignnone" width="497"]
Bit scratched but, kind of futuristic in a puffy sort of way. Click image to enlarge.[/caption]
This must've been one great electronic toy -- it took someone nearly a decade before they were willing to throw it out. I pulled it out of a dumpster last year, It's a VideoNow Personal Video Player, first generation, from 2003, sold by Hasbro through its Tiger Electronics division. It's about the size of extra-thick portable CD player. Requires two AA batteries and plays proprietary four-inch PVD discs at about 15-frames-a-second on a small, low-resolution black-and-white LCD screen. It has basic navigation controls, contrast and volume, and a headphone jack. Apparently it doesn't have much in the way of skip protection. By 2004, there was a colour version and apparently that year it was an award-winning toy. The VideoNow went through several generations, and appears to have been discontinued by 2005.
The unit I binned was in very good shape and contained a Transformers PVD disc. Click the images to transform them.
Hasbro made editing software for creating VideoNow PVDs, and sold a PVD video camera. It was interesting to read how users experimented with recording on, and cutting down CD-R discs to run in the latter-generation units. There seems to be no straight forward way to play the PVDs on a computer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ8RpMxjEOs
Bit scratched but, kind of futuristic in a puffy sort of way. Click image to enlarge.[/caption]This must've been one great electronic toy -- it took someone nearly a decade before they were willing to throw it out. I pulled it out of a dumpster last year, It's a VideoNow Personal Video Player, first generation, from 2003, sold by Hasbro through its Tiger Electronics division. It's about the size of extra-thick portable CD player. Requires two AA batteries and plays proprietary four-inch PVD discs at about 15-frames-a-second on a small, low-resolution black-and-white LCD screen. It has basic navigation controls, contrast and volume, and a headphone jack. Apparently it doesn't have much in the way of skip protection. By 2004, there was a colour version and apparently that year it was an award-winning toy. The VideoNow went through several generations, and appears to have been discontinued by 2005.
The unit I binned was in very good shape and contained a Transformers PVD disc. Click the images to transform them.
Hasbro made editing software for creating VideoNow PVDs, and sold a PVD video camera. It was interesting to read how users experimented with recording on, and cutting down CD-R discs to run in the latter-generation units. There seems to be no straight forward way to play the PVDs on a computer.
Here's a YouTube video of the original VideoNow in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ8RpMxjEOs
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)