Repurposing HD-DVD players into something useful?

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?

larwe wrote:

> 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?

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

On Feb 15, 11:53=A0am, msg <msg@_cybertheque.org_> wrote:
> larwe wrote:

> > cheaply. =A0The 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?
>
> Holy cow! Was this some sort of early rollout approach using COTS and
> opensource solutions? =A0Sure doesn't sound cost-effective for large
> volume.

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).

larwe wrote:

<snip>

> Yep. The HD-A1 (first Toshiba player) is basically a PC with some
> stuff glued onto the edges and daughterboards galore.

<snip>

Interesting; photos of the mainboard and cabling with short arch. description:
http://www.edn.com/contents/images/6372830.pdf

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

msg wrote:

 > This has evidently been a show stopper in attempting
> to discover the drivers for onboard devices and the interest in the forms
> has waned.

s/forms/forums/

larwe wrote:
> The earliest DVD players were the same, if you recall (Pentium-75 I
> believe; we've come a long way).

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.

On Feb 15, 7:00=A0pm, Eric Smith <e...@brouhaha.com> wrote:


> There might have been some Pentium-based DVD players, but I never saw

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.