Toshiba HD-DVD dissected.

[Smokey]

An Audio/Video/computer nerd named Lorin bought himself a fancy new Toshiba HD-DVD player and dismantled it without even plugging it into a TV to see what type of hardware/software lurk inside. His finding is interesting.

He found that.....

Operating System (OS) is stored on one 256 meg NAND flash memory device and is based off Red Hat Linux. For hardware, the unit uses a 2.5 Ghz Pentium 4 and a gig of PC2700 RAM. Internally the unit runs on Red Hat which looks like it was originally formatted as FAT32, and then repartitioned with ext2fs

When he pulled out the HD-DVD drive and connected it to an XP machine, identified itself as “_NEC HDDVD HR1100A“ which is a recently-released HD-DVD reader that also reads normal DVDs and CDs

For more detail: http://geekswithblogs.net/lorint/archive/2006/04/21/75795.aspx

http://hdvforever.com/blog/HDDVD_OpenBox.jpg
http://gizmodo.com/images/2006/05/hddvddisk.jpg

[Geoffcin]

An Audio/Video/computer nerd named Lorin bought himself a fancy new Toshiba HD-DVD player and dismantled it without even plugging it into a TV to see what type of hardware/software lurk inside. His finding is interesting.

He found that.....

Operating System (OS) is stored on one 256 meg NAND flash memory device and is based off Red Hat Linux. For hardware, the unit uses a 2.5 Ghz Pentium 4 and a gig of PC2700 RAM. Internally the unit runs on Red Hat which looks like it was originally formatted as FAT32, and then repartitioned with ext2fs

When he pulled out the HD-DVD drive and connected it to an XP machine, identified itself as “_NEC HDDVD HR1100A“ which is a recently-released HD-DVD reader that also reads normal DVDs and CDs

If this unit is based on off-the-shelf computer hardware, hackers are going to eat it for lunch!

The guy had another thing to say too;

"There are some folks out there who think that Toshiba is losing money on the HD-A1. I think they are right. Quite a bit of high-priced silicon is in there, as well as obviously a ton of R&D work"

[Smokey]

If this unit is based on off-the-shelf computer hardware, hackers are going to eat it for lunch!

It seem somebody already started on that :D

Looks like Toshiba is rehashing the strategy Microsoft used with the original Xbox and using off the shelf components to get to market faster.

[kexodusc]

I'm no computer wiz by any stretch so maybe you guys can explain to me why this is bad? It seems to simple ol' me that hackers were gonna get into this anyway sooner or later...I could be wrong but from what I've seen there's two kinds of consumers - those that'll hack and pirate, and those that won't. How's this gonna be bad for Toshiba or whoever?

[musicman1999]

So thats why it takes so long to boot up.

bill

[teledynepost]

Yeah I work at BBuy and I think I got to about '40' after I had decided to start counting when waiting for it to boot.

[westcott]

Maybe we should all pitch in and mail this guy a grounding wrist strap for his next project!

[nightflier]

I'm no computer wiz by any stretch so maybe you guys can explain to me why this is bad? It seems to simple ol' me that hackers were gonna get into this anyway sooner or later...I could be wrong but from what I've seen there's two kinds of consumers - those that'll hack and pirate, and those that won't. How's this gonna be bad for Toshiba or whoever?

Two reasons: people will be able to build their own HD systems rather than shelling out $500 for them, and... someone somewhere is going to write a virus for it.

The piracy thing is more related to the disks rather than the player. But I predict the copy protection will be cracked by the time a writable HD disk is available on PC's.

One positive thing is that since the Toshiba player is using Linux, there won't be a need for someone to risk life-in-prison-by-RIAA just to be able to watch movies on his Linux box. This also means that the Microsoft-HD marriage will be tested. Frankly I was surprised that Microsoft would not go the BR route, instead. Maybe they'll switch sides in the end?

BTW, hackers are not all bad people. We wouldn't be on this discussion board chatting over the Internet w/o them....