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Adding a Hard Drive... To Your DVD Player?
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."
Xvid is taking over from divx in the release scene. Hopefully a dvd player will come out that will support xvid, vobsub, ac3, etc.
BTW your XBoX can be modified to play divx already, and you can hack it to upgrade the hard drive or it can play off your computer's hard drive too.
It would certainly be an advantage to be one of the first to market with something like this, not to mention the hordes of geeks (like myself) who would be compelled to go out and get one immediately.
The real question is though, by the time Divx player become common, as in afforable enough for a majority of /.'rs, will blue ray dvd be the next big rave?
With "potential" *couph vaporware couph* to contain some 15+hours of video, why not just have 10 movie ondemand on one disk. The entire series of Star Trek Movies that you can switch with a single press of a button.
It is my beleif that we will see less and less of these players that have the capabilites of manipulation as DRM locks down in a deathgrip to hold onto its business model. Sad but true.
My ignorance is a perfect shield against your logic.
The business model that comes is this. First you connect the dvd player to the internet. Then you sell movies for a resonable price. Cable TV's Pay-Per-View seems to be reasonable enough that people use it. The only difference is that when someone pays to view they save the movie and can watch it as many times as they want. DivX format would probably be optimal for this kind of service. It uses the least bandwith to transfer the file and more of them can be stored on the drive. And since it is lower quality than an actual DVD people will still go out and buy their favorite movies on optical media.
This would be especially awesome if they have a large database of old movies that are relatively cheaper to download and if they also provide newer movies that were just in theatres, even at a slightly higher price, so you don't have to wait for DVDs to come out (even though the waiting time has greatly decreased).
I see many people spending a dollar a day watching all the movies they always wanted to see and never did.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
much like the various TiVo mods and hacks out there this seems like another step toward tape/disc-less video archiving - hurrah say I!
Music's already gone this way, and since digital media came to video (DVD) later than to music (Audio CD) it makes sense that video is lagging somewhat in this next evoloutionary step.
Of course the really neat thing will be when these puppies start being able to be plugged into a home network enabling centralised mhome media archives...
incidentally I think those posters asserting that these devices can only be intended for pirates are forgetting the phenomenal amount of physical space that a decent movie collection currently occupies, not to mention the headache of keeping track of them! - my housemate's a movie buff and her room is piled to the rafters with (legit) cassettes and discs - the selection is great but it takes almost as long to find the film you want to see as it does to watch! digitising the collection when it's possible will solve both the storage and retreval headaches in one!
personally I can't wait.
This basically goes for all players, but for DivX support i surely hope they will have an easy way to upgrade the codecs. Seeing how many different ones there are now.. divx 3.x, 4 5, divx with AC3 sound codec, now the XviD stuff. DivX isnt exactly "one standard" anymore.
A lot of these inexpensive DVD players have standard IDE drives inside. I could pull the drive from my Apex AD-660 for instance, and pop it right into my PC if I desired to.
These are some of the most flexible and hackable DVD players on the market, and their price point is pretty low. I love my region-free AD-660.
on some sets, the picture looks better using the rf inputs than the composite or s-video inputs. a lot of sets are too sharp and unless they have a control to soften the picture, using the rf input can soften it enough to reduce the annoying effects of edge enhancement and compression artifacts. the picture on my tv definitely looks better if i use the rf input. if you have a top of the line digital monitor, that's different, but with most tvs rf input is at least adequate.
Why wait for DVD-player's to get features you need? We're building a DVD player with my friend which can do DVD, VCD, DIVX, OGG, MP3.. actually everything xine can. And it has 132X64 graphical lcd, custom joystick for buttons, remote control, hard drive, possibly net access for cddb and streaming video and audio. Most of you probably say "nay, this bloke's just another troll or something", well go check out pics
Another good device for this is an XBox. Just chip it and put in a 120GB hard drive. You can play almost any media with the XBox Media Player software off the HD or streaming from a networked PC. It works really well and is easy to do.
I have no seen anyoen yet talk about this kind of hack in the responses. Has anyone heard of such a hack? Why you may ask I wish to have Network capabilties? So the DVD player could rip the movies directly on my network server (or HD to transfer later) and play them back from that server. Would be a sweet utility program.
Yes I am aware that some computer PVR's already do this, but the problem is with the fact it is a computer. I take time for bootup, and the OS has the abiltiy to crash. The bootup sequence so not only be immediate but also on a more perm state; a eprom.
Any hacks or maybe devices like this, I would be interested to hear about.
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...