Nintendo Video

Revision as of 23:10, 10 November 2014 by Vgturtle127 (talk | contribs) (Fixes)

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:

  1. Set up a DNS server using bind9, which returned my IP as the IP for pubeu-p.est.c.app.nintendowifi.net (bind config).
    1. Don't forget to replace MY_IP in config with your IP address, but don't replace the IP of conntest.nintendowifi.net service
  2. 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.
  3. Configured my 3DS to use my DNS server as both primary and secondary DNS server.
  4. ???
  5. 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.

External links