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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."
Annoyances? I thought they were bugs.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
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.
Columbia House will be selling these things with a hundred movies pre-installed for a penny. All that one needs to do is buy another six over the course of three years (*).
(*) Movie-of-the-month will automatically be downloaded unless you send back this reader service card indicating that you do not want to receive it. Tax, shipping and handling extra.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
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.
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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"If this is so easy to do, why haven't the various consumer electronics manufacturers shipped DVD players with a hard drive on board?" :) rather builds his own HTPC.
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
Real life is overrated.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
At the risk of sounding like a broken record (I've posted on this software a few times and even tried to post it to /. as a story but ...oh well.)
Qcast is the media server people are wishing they had in a few dozen posts here. You don't need to add a hard drive to a DVD player...all you need is a PS2.
Qcast is a two-disk installation. Install Disk 1 on your PC, loaded up with movies and tunes (mpeg1,2,4, xvid, divx, svcd, vcd, mp3.) Then load Disk 2 on networked PS2 (cheaper than Sampo DVE631CF and hard drive) and bingo! You have a spiffy Flash interface on the PS2 for all your PC-based content, which then streams over your network on demand.
No taking apart DVD players..if you need more space, add an IDE or Firewire drive to your PC in about five minutes.
And even better...you can use multiple PS2s to stream different content from the same PC all over the house. Not only that but you can point the PS2 to multiple drives. This blows away a HD-equipped DVD player, since the PS2 plays DVDs natively anyway.
Disclaimer: I neither work for, nor have any financial interest in Qcast. I just think it's cool as shit and no one knows about it. Well you do now.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."