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Adding a Hard Drive... To Your DVD Player?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the why-the-hell-not dept.

El Puerco Loco writes "Area 450 has several guides to adding hardware to the Sampo DVE631CF DVD player. Even if you don't own this model, the firmware for it has been ported to many, many other models (with annoyances like macrovision and region locking removed). This player had built in support for an IDE device (a flash card reader) so a standard IDE drive can be slaved to the dvd drive and the player can read from a FAT32 formatted disk. The player decodes mp3s and VCD files, so it's possible to turn it into a cheap mp3 jukebox, or store movies in vcd format. I hope that when DiVX support becomes more common in DVD players one of them will be able to support a hack like this. It would be really cool to have 100+ movies built in to my dvd player."

4 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. What kind of business could come of this? by Anonymous+Custard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ok, so the RIAA/MPAA doesn't like when new technology takes away from their business, but over the decades most recording technologies actually turn out to be profitable for the music/movie industry.

    What kind of business models might be derived from DVD+LargeHardDisk players? And not just for the geeks --- this has to be useful to your average joe-can't-set-his-vcr-clock. How can we utilize this technology, so customers get cooler services, the industry still makes money, and we all get a better movie experience?

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  2. Re:Makes you wonder ... by dabadab · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "If this is so easy to do, why haven't the various consumer electronics manufacturers shipped DVD players with a hard drive on board?"
    It might be easy to connect a hard drive as a piece of hardware but it may be troublesome to get it integrated into the system - and embedded systems are more costly to develop than applications because of the higher expectations of quality (releasing patches is not an option) and the limitations of the hardware.
    The HDD itself is also expensive - I see DVD players that cost just as much as a 80GB HDD so adding a HDD would dramatically increase the player's price.
    And in the end it is hard to justify these costs - average consumers just could not make any use of the HDD and the geeky kind (e.g. myself :) rather builds his own HTPC.

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  3. macrovision by dizco · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Or is this just for the pirated movies? The fact that it blocks macrovision suggests this may be the case.

    I'm glad you have all modern components. My TV has only a coax input. my dvd player has only composite and svideo out. If it weren't for the fact that i can disable macrovision in my dvd player, i would need to buy a new tv. instead, i disable macrovision and use my vcr to convert from composite to coax. why should i have to buy a new tv because the industry doesn't trust me?

  4. dvd player that plays divx encoded cd's by ozzy_cow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    what about my collection of divx CD-Rs?

    check this out: http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/021022/047810.html

    i think ill be getting one of those :-)