HDDVD player pulled apart - it's a blinking PC!

[dangel]

http://geekswithblogs.net/lorint/arc.../21/75795.aspx

"Upon hearing rumors that Toshiba put a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4 CPU and a gig of PC2700 DDR RAM in their new $500 high definition set-top DVD player, I was intrigued. When I heard that they also put in a standard desktop HD-DVD reader, I had to buy one and see if these wild accusations were true."


At least we understand the hefty price tags now!

[Funkstar]

yep. there was a seriese of photos on Engadget just after the players started shipping. Even has a regular memory slot.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zerokil...7594108018321/

[Skinleech]

Makes sense really, judging by the specs released to get HD content playing. Be nice ifd you could just rip out the drive & pop it in your pc. Of course, that would entail not caring about the sheel with the P4 & ram, etc.

[Robert]

When will PC drives be available?

[mull]

That's just pathetic really, innit? Not exactly an effcient bit of consumer electronics.

[directhex]

runs red hat linux 7.3

[Robert]

That's just pathetic really, innit? Not exactly an effcient bit of consumer electronics.

It'll probably be efficient for Toshiba. The bits for it can be bought for next to nothing now and it's probably a damn sight cheaper than designing a decoder chip.

[Funkstar]

it also means that they probably designed the hardware long before the spec was completed. All they have to do then is change the software and everything works. If they had built a single purpose chip to do this, then they might have been limited in their final specs.

also, remember, the menu system can be extremely complex. I can't remember what language HD-DVD use, but BluRay use Java for theirs. this means that disk authors can put together fully interactive apps as menus that just happen to launch some HD video when asked to.

[Agent]

This will be hacked in no time.....