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Toshiba HD-DVD Player Torn Apart

voidunknown   on 03 May 2006 - 21:04 · 53 comments & 46459 views

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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!

View: Tear down video (slow) | Torrent
News source: Blog

Post a comment · Send to friend Comments · There are 53 additional comments
(1 reply) #1 on 01 Jan 1970 - 00:00
#1.1 vetvoidunknown on 03 May 2006 - 21:20
Quote - Nose Nuggets said @ #1
looks rad. im downloading it now.

did he get it back together and working?

/drtfa

Dunno. But I don't see why not.
#2 vetvoidunknown on 03 May 2006 - 21:21
Quote - itaniumx86 said @ #2
is it workign properly at Vista?

He doesn't have Vista to install...
(1 reply) #3 on 01 Jan 1970 - 00:00
#3.1 vetvoidunknown on 03 May 2006 - 22:00
Quote - MrA said @ #9
I have a few questions about this:
a) Why the hell does it have a P4? If it's for video decoding, then whoever thought of using a P4 (or any general purpose CPU) should be shot. Anywho, the P4 is slow, hot and overall crap compared to Intel's latest offerings.
b) Why the hell is it running Red Hat linux? I mean, MS is a backer of HD-DVD. They could have offered to give Toshiba XP Embedded or WinCE. Anywho, this means that Toshiba will HAVE TO make available the source code. Go HD-DVD hacking!

No thanks, I don't want my HD-DVD player crashing.

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