11/02/25

Tamagotchi TV - The Crystal Website

Tamagotchi TV (not to be confused with Tamagotchi TV),

is a bonus disc for the Tamagotchi Familetchi (Connections V5);
that was bundled with Familetchi's sold in Oceania and European regions (but not the USA);

a Japanese version also exists; as well as a "Gorgeous" variant; for the Japanese FamiTama Royal (we know it as Connections v5.5)

it was given out as a kinda a "Loose" DVD packed in with the rest of it; and the disc looked like this:

Europe & Oceania Version	Japanese Version	Japanese "Gorgeous" Version

(if anyone has a better image of the original JP Disc, please let me know- this is best I've been able to find)

Interesting thing about this is we actually had this DVD back in the day; Though saying that, would not know where our copy of this actually is today.

It's contains a collection of mini games that when completed would give you a "Special Password" to unlock unique items.
on top of this it has some sort of "fake advertisements" for items you can 'buy' on the device for a discounted price.
than it would be using the "Shopping Channel" on the familetchi itself.

that you could enter into a Tamagotchi Familetchi, to unlock hidden food items or accessories for your tamagotchi-;

Anyway, point is i wanted to archive and preserve these discs contents, as their a fairly rare and obscure part of Tamagotchi's history;
that even the Tamagotchi Wiki doesn't seem to have a page about.

so asked around on Tamagotchi Collectors discord, and found someone who still had their original disc-
"Konky" who also had attempted to make an ISO Disc Image of the disc before, but unfortunately was unable to make a successful rip;

This is not anything against them, it is actually to be expected; as most commercial DVD-Video discs contain
 "Content Scramble System" copy protection; which is meant to stop you from doing basically exactly that
(creating an ISO of a DVD.)

.. wait? DVD-Video?? Didn't you say "Tamagotchi TV" disc contains a bunch of minigames;

it is actually just a regular DVD-Video, and can be played in any DVD Player; the way the way this works is that DVD-Videos
had a 'menu' system, which could enable features like subtitles, and skip to certain sections of the disc (named "titles")
which was primarily used for e.g episodic shows; or for a scene selection, or special features;

but as it turns out this menu system is actually fairly in-depth, enough that Bandai/WIZZ tried to make games out of it;
which is exactly what the "Tamagotchi TV" disc is; and this honestly, makes the whole thing even more intriguing to me-

but anyway, because of that, if we want to get a copy of the disc, we're gonna need an approach a bit more involved than simply creating an ISO;

Thankfully, the Content Scramble System is actually very well understood at this point, and there exists software to crack it; such as "DVD Decryptor"
which is also capable of creating an ISO of a disc, so just use that ...

well you would just use that, except as it turns out, the only computer our friend with the actual DVD had that also had a Disc Drive, was a Mac computer;
and DVD Decryptor is only for computers running Microsoft Windows-

So i began trying to find any software that could do this on Mac OS- and as it turns out there were a few, such as Handbrake and MakeMKV;
however they all had a massive problem, and that was- these were advertised as DVD "Converters"- that is, they take the actual "video" stored on a DVD

and try give you out a .MP4 or .MKV file containing whatever movie or whatever is stored on the disc- they do not create a raw ISO
(well actually later learned that MakeMKV apparently can; but attempting to do so on MacOS immediately crashes the program- so it really can't)

which is probably fine in most cases, except this one, because Tamagotchi TV is basically a DVD Menu "Games" it doesn't really contain a movie or anything;
thus it was pretty critical that any copy of it would include all the menus and everything else intact;

this kind of was a bit surprising, but looking at it on windows, to be honest DVD Decryptor is also the only thing i knew that could do this-
(well im aware of MakeMKV NOW, this does atleast work on windows, but i didnt know it had this function back then)

The solution in the end, was to open the disc in VLC Media Player, this will unlock protected sectors for reading, however their still encrypted;
then rip an encrypted ISO of the disc using Disk Utility on MacOS; finally konky sent *me* this file, and i mounted it on my computer;
and then tried to run DVD Decryptor on it,

which gave a few warnings, and told me it would have to brute-force the key and it could be apparently take awhile, *thankfully though*
CSS was created during the time of the United States Export ban On Cryptography And is therefore weak as fuck,

the key size is 40 bits, which is trivial to bruteforce on modern computers. this took less than a second and was now decrypting the ISO;
 

after that i was able to finally have a successful rip of the EUR version of Tamagotchi TV; after this, i learned from this whole ordeal,
and decided to write my own software to decrypt DVDs into ISOs; for Windows AND MacOS;

Some interesting things about the disc is that it's actually 8GB in size, and takes up the complete space of a Dual Layer DVD-
infact, its likely it actually went over, since the video on the disc is fairly compressed- most of the storage is spent on multiple languages on the same DVD.

anyways, after this i started looking for the Japanese and "Gorgeous" versions of the disc;

i did eventually also manage to find someone who had the Japanese Version, this time a "kusatchi1";
though they had a windows computer with a disc drive; so it was fairly trivial, they just used DVD Decryptor on it; and uploaded an ISO;

an interesting thing about this version of it, is that some sections there are actually voice lines, whereas on
and the quality of the disc is significantly better, the file size is only around 4gb, and fills the size of a single layer disc; most of the saving seems to be
on removing all other languages except Japanese from the disc.

uploaded that, and now we have a successful rip of the JPN version of Tamagotchi TV
 

Which leaves, finally the v5.5/Royal FamiTama "Gorgeous" version; this time it was "Naomitchi" who had the disc;
by this time, DumpDVD was mostly complete, so we just used that though i think they also just had a windows computer;

and then we have a successful rip of the "Gorgeous" version of Tamagotchi TV, the interesting thing about this one is the FamiTama Royal special codes;
which as far as i know no one has figured out how they work yet, or given any examples of them, so this might be the only such examples for them-

And thats it, thats all variations of Tamagotchi TV successfully archived and saved online, you can find them on the Internet Archive;

• Europe Tamagotchi TV
• Japan Tamagotchi TV
• Tamagotchi TV Gorgeous
   

Also, there was no V5.5 english version of the "Gorgeous" version, it was only released in japan (in english regions we got the "V5.5 bonus disc" instead.)

Oh and at some point i'd like to make a sort of DVD Menu "Disassembler" to dig into how this *actually works* in a technical sense, but that sounds like alot of work.

This site was last updated 10/29/25

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