Toshiba HD-DVD player just a mini PC

Quakester2000

May 11, 2006

D4rk0n3 and
soloza used our news submit to tell us while some people can't wait to get their hands on the next generation HD-DVD players some people just cant wait to take them apart. Lorin Thwaits was one of the first to get a HD-DVD player but instead of trying out some HD films he decided to disassemble the player before he turned it on to find out what made it tick. What he found was that the HD-DVD player is actually a mini PC, the insides contain a Intel Pentium 4 2.5 GHZ processor and 1 Gigabyte of PC2700 memory.

The actual drive for the player is a standard PC E-IDE drive, from what can be seen, the player seems to be off the shelf components. The player's operating system is Red Hat Linux with a 256 Meg flash partition formatted in Fat 32 with ex2fs. To check out this cool video of him pulling the machine apart check this out. Tearing apart HD-DVD player Video. Also check out his Blog for more info on what he has found.

By now we all know that Toshiba has released its HD-DVD drive to the wild. Some people didn't care, while others had to be the first to own one. For Lorin Thwaits, being among the first to own one wasn't enough. He ran out and bought one and then took it home. Before even plugging it in, he disassembled the entire HD-DVD player. In his tear down article he explains that the HD-DVD player actually includes a Pentium 4 2.5GHz processor and 1GB of PC2700 memory.

No wonder they cost $500 each. The HD-DVD player also included a standard IDE HD-DVD player. One can only wonder if you could actually plug this into your PC while running Vista. The Toshiba player runs on Red Hat using a 256MB USB flash memory module that was originally formatted with FAT32, and then repartitioned with ext2fs. There is also a tear down video available. Props to this guy for having the guts to tear apart his brand new HD-DVD player without even plugging it in!http://hdvforever.com/blog/HDDVD.wmv

This guy definetly has some guts, got to give him a pat on the back he practically rips it apart bit by bit.

Source: Geekswithblogs