Narrow-Bandwidth Television Association

Several years ago I came across a Videonow player at a thrift store. The Videonow player was a personal video player for children made in 2003 by Hasboro. It looks like a portable CD player with a tiny screen on the front. It plays mini cds with the video and audio encoded in a proprietary but Redbook-compatible PCM format. I bought it without a clue as to what it was, and unfortunately it came with no discs so I eventually took it apart for the LCD screen and forgot about it, but recently it popped back into my memory. I bought one on eBay, did some research, and found that the original black and white version had a resolution of 80x80 pixels at 15 fps using only 16 greys (4 bits per pixel). Even with these limitations it actually produces a decent image, although wide shots can be hard to recognize. This format may be of interest to NBTVers because it doesn't use any sophisticated codecs. There is also a color version that has a 160 line resolution.

More info:

http://pvdtools.sourceforge.net/format.txt

http://www.videotechnology.com/old0804.html#hasbro