With the industry scuttlebutt saying that Toshiba will likely kill HD- DVD very soon, I expect to see a lot of hardware dumped on eBay cheaply. The earlier players were basically an embedded Linux PC with a 2.5GHz Pentium 4, 1GB RAM, a 256Mb flash drive and various other bolted-on subsystems; is this still true?
I haven't been able to find a community of people turning these idiot boxes into something useful; are any c.a.e denizens aware of such an effort?
Holy cow! Was this some sort of early rollout approach using COTS and opensource solutions? Sure doesn't sound cost-effective for large volume.
Michael
Yep. The HD-A1 (first Toshiba player) is basically a PC with some stuff glued onto the edges and daughterboards galore. Even the HD-DVD drive is a standard bay-mountable PC-compatible (PATA) drive hidden behind a cosmetic door, and the RAM is a socketed SODIMM. Rumor has it that Toshiba is losing several hundred dollars per unit sold (hoping to make it up on patent licensing if the medium took off).
The earliest DVD players were the same, if you recall (Pentium-75 I believe; we've come a long way).
Interesting; photos of the mainboard and cabling with short arch. description:
Web searching yields some lengthy hacking discussions on 'doom9' and other sites; seems that the machine can be booted from an external usb disk, but Toshiba has ignored demands to comply with GPL release of code and the kernel and other files appear to be encrypted based on hardware keys (in the DVD drive and elsewhere). This has evidently been a show stopper in attempting to discover the drivers for onboard devices and the interest in the forms has waned.
If using the mainboard with only USB, ethernet and ATA/IDE was sufficient for a project, it could easily be repurposed.
Michael
s/forms/forums/
I've got the earliest commercial DVD player, a Sony DVP-S7000. It contains three microprocessors, none of which is an x86. The "main" processor is a Hitachi (now Renesas) SH series RISC processor.
There might have been some Pentium-based DVD players, but I never saw one.
Oh, they existed. I had one - I believe it was a Toshiba again - back in Oz. It was like deja vu reading the first HD-DVD player reviews complaining about how the embedded PC takes a minute from powerup to ready-to-play, because the "PC-based" standalone DVD players had exactly the same shortcoming.
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