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.

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:

See 🔗 http://www.wiibrew.org/wiki/Country_Codes for the country codes.

Language codes known so far:

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.

Downloaded videos are stored in the SD card Extdata, from the decrypted SpotPass content payload, adding an additional header to them. Country info is presumably stored in this metadata, region-lock is handled by the BOSS module via the programID in the payload header.

While the SpotPass payload uses little-endian, the extra header added to the Extdata is stored in big-endian.

The SpotPass content downloaded for Nintendo Video uses the SpotPass content container format, see the SpotPass page for info on the container format. At the end of the video file is a JPEG, which contains the video thumbnail, and various advertising metadata (interactive links) including the URL associated with the video. The text shown on the web browser button is also stored in the interactive links.

Region info is stored in the decrypted SpotPass crypto layer, see above SD section.

The following entries use little-endian.

The release and expire date are stored using a custom timestamp, where each value (year, month, day…) is stored as unique bytes.

Interactive links are structures that store the advertising and thumbnail data that is displayed to the user during the video playback.

Interactive links store a thumbnail image as a JPEG image.

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 watch videos with the web browser and something like Universal Media Server.

• 🔗 A video showing Nintendo Video server being spoofed