Reverse Engineering Redbox

Hey Kaitlyn,

Now is your chance to get a free, several hundred pound DVD rental kiosk! What's happening here hits all my favorite beats—preserving old tech, repair, hacking, messy bankruptcies. Just a fun one all around.

-Jason

The code that runs Redbox DVD rental machines has been dumped online, and, in the wake of the company’s bankruptcy, a community of tinkerers and reverse engineers are probing the operating system to learn how it works. Naturally, one of the first things people did was make one of the machines run Doom. 

As has been detailed in several great articles elsewhere, the end of Redbox has been a clusterfuck, with pharmacies, grocery stores, and other retailers stuck with very large, heavy, abandoned DVD rental kiosks. To many people’s surprise, many of the kiosks remain operational even with the bankruptcy of Redbox’s parent company, which has led some people to  “liberate” DVDs from the abandoned kiosks. Reddit is full of posts by people who say they have taken dozens of DVDs from kiosks all over the country.

Free DVDs is one thing. But in recent days, people have realized that they can, in some cases, get free Redbox kiosks. In an August filing, Walgreens told the bankruptcy court that it has 5,400 abandoned kiosks at its stores, and that it is spending $184,000 a month keeping them powered. “Walgreens should not be required to continue to ‘store’ and power Redbox kiosks across the country without any form of payment,” the company wrote. And so tinkerers and reverse engineers have begun asking stores whether they can take the devices off their hands. 

There are also posts on Reddit by contractors who are selling them, and I was able to find various Redbox DVD kiosks being advertised for sale on Facebook Marketplace. (There are far more listings on Facebook Marketplace from people who have obtained hundreds or thousands of Redbox DVDs and are now selling them.)

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“When I heard that they were going bankrupt, I went and got a few discs as a keepsake before I realized that I wasn’t charged for them,” JandaJanda2, a Redditor who put Doom on their Redbox, told 404 Media. “After talking with some people on the subreddit about how they worked, I knew I had to get my hands on one.”

“One day while driving around I noticed that the Redbox at my local CVS had disappeared, I then went to all the CVS locations in my area until I found one that still had it, then I waited,” they added. “The contractors showed up and I was able to make a deal with them to purchase one of the machines.”

File a Discord member pulled off of a Redbox. Image: Godfather/Discord

In a Discord community called “Redbox Tinkering,” a FAQ states “just ask the store manager if you can have it. They will most likely tell you to just take it, but don’t just take it without asking.” 

“Use heavy or appliance hand-trucks/dolly to wheel it onto your trailer or out to your truck,” the FAQ says. “It is heavy, so be prepared. I pull it right onto the trailer and strap it down standing up. You can lay them down, but know that most of the discs will be in disarray when you open it. Take everything having to do with Redbox, don’t leave a mess.” The FAQ also contains information about how to disconnect the Redbox from its power supply and how to cut through the bolts that secure the kiosk to concrete with a grinder. It also has information about how to open and disassemble the device at home.

Another person who has gotten a Redbox goes by Broulfy on the Redbox Tinkering Discord. They told 404 Media that they got their Redbox kiosk from a Walgreens, and that getting it home took about an hour with the help of some equipment they rented from Lowes: “While these things are HEAVY, getting the machine to my house wasn't really that hard,” they said. 

“I drove around my local town, found one at the Walgreens near my house and contacted the store manager, they gave me the green light so I got my friend that's an electrician to help me disconnect the power from the building so we'd be safe to cut the cable,” they said. “Unlike most tinkerer's my main goal isn't to reverse engineer the Official Software more than I have to. I am mainly interested in carousel movement, movie retrieving/returning, etc. I am using the machine to make my own version of the App to effectively do the same thing the original software does, but with my own spin on it. I mainly want to use it to create a massive DVD/Blu-Ray storage machine with ease of use for retrieving the movies.”

“I work in IT and have a decent sized Homelab and I've always been interested in making things work again once they break,” they added. 

What the inside of a Redbox kiosk looks like. Image: JandaJanda2

Recently the operating system for Redbox kiosks was dumped online, and this community is now probing it to see how it works. In a thread on Mastodon, reverse engineer Foone Turing has been posting some of her findings, which include the fact that Redbox machines contain a file that has “a complete list of titles ever rented, and the email addresses of the people who rented them, and where and when.” She also found that the first six and last four digits of credit card information was logged. She said that the records on the particular unit that she was looking at contained 2,471 different transactions and had records on it dating back to 2015. 

Other reverse engineers have found that Redbox kiosks contained information about the physical locations of every other kiosk. The server that they communicated with is currently offline (because the company is bankrupt). But people have also been putting together information about what different error codes in the software mean (for example, the error code “0020BDT” would happen when an obstruction was detected in the machine). They have also found and dumped service manuals for different parts of the device and have found a few login passwords (one password is "US#1Choice4movierentals").

“Since I’ve gotten the machine, with the help of some very talented programmers, and ex-technicians for Redbox we have gotten it to a point where we can do anything a service technician could do while it was in service, including restocking the inventory,” JandaJanda2 told me. “We are working on reverse engineering it further so that we can do things such as, removing the card reader, adding our own custom movies, storing different types of media and more. My plan right now is to have it as a movie dispenser that I can get discs from anytime and then put back when I’m done, But I would like to be able to add my own collection of games to it in time.”

There has also been discussion about how the machines could be modified to talk to a new server, or whether the operating system could be put on a DIY Redbox device. Another person installed Minecraft on their Redbox. It is still very early days, but, with the bankruptcy of Redbox’s parent company, ironically these devices are being given new life.