Apparently, this week is not a really good week for my equipment. On Wednesday, I announced the passing of my beloved
iiyama A 201 HT, tonight, one of the DVD-players quit on me.
The subject of tonight's post is a Cyberhome CH-DVD 402; a region-free player capable of reading, decoding and providing many things, including DTS-signals. Until tonight.
Since this player was the one in my collection capable of doing that AND sporting an S-video output (my Philips DVD-622 player is also DTS-capable, but has no S-video output; my CH-DVD 401 has S-video but no DTS and neither has the Silvercrest in my bedroom), I was in a bind when the Cyberhome decided to give up, just before I wanted to feed him the DTS version of
Ghost in the Shell.
Now, I happen to know that this model player utilises a fairly simple design, with something resembling a PC-type DVD-ROM drive like Sampo did, and those are fairly easy to
modify.
My hopes were up, so I took the top off, and discovered that the player was mostly empty, save for the power supply, a really tiny circuit board sporting the various outputs and obviously the controls on the front panel:
As you may remember from the
pictures I made of the Encore player-VGA hack I did a while ago, a DVD-player needs some decoding hardware in order to get something sensible on the outputs.
Said hardware usually does not fit on a tiny circuit board also containing a 40-pin ribbon connector and various output connectors, so removing the output board from the back panel and flipping it over confirmed my suspicions.
No elaborate electronics at all, save for some active components on the other side, so an IDE-interface is out of the question.
But the back of the drive says differently:
Well, last time I checked, the
IDE standard does not provide in analog audio and video signals, so a logical conclusion would be that the drive is a custom job!
The drive itself looks like a normal drive at first glance, but usually one would find a sticker with a brand name, a model number and such on it. None of that; just a sticker stating the obvious and the address of some Taiwanese OEM, but that's all; not even a model number:
But what is that strange silver pen mark on the sticker?
A little 96% undrinkable alcohol and a cotton swab later, and we learn that the drive is also known as a 482D model:
Google returns with a
German web site stating that this is a CD-ROM drive, capable of reading various formats. But no DVD.
That leaves two options; either they used the shells of old CD-ROM drives to house the pickup unit, or they made something to custom specifications, labelling it 482D. Why they would blot out the model number afterwards is beyond me though. To add to the suspicion of an outer shell being retrofitted; the "Warranty Void if Seal is Broken"-sticker is indeed broken. :)
Right, let's open this thing up and see what 's in there. Well, this:
You are looking at the main PCB, with the driving and decoding chips under thermal pads (I removed the bigger one to reveal the decoder chip); the orange thing on the left is the pickup mechanism, the two chips top right look like memory chips; the fake IDE-connector can be spotted in the middle on the right and the chip with the purple sticker is a 29F800BTC-70; probably an (E)EPROM containing the firmware.
In short: they built a custom drive, containing a pickup mechanism capable of reading DVD's, put in a PCB with all the necessary parts to decode MPEG and show JPEG pictures and customized the PCB that sits in the front of these drives, usually containing an analogue audio output, an Eject-button and a Volume dial.
Hard-to-come-by stuff, so to put it in other words; there's a snowball's chance in hell I'll be able to breathe some new life into this thing, and even if I were lucky and the chipset is capable of driving the replacement laser pickup (provided that the ribbon cable would fit), the amount of time I would additionally spend in trying to make it work would be ridiculous compared to the cost of another DTS-capable player.
So this is where our little lesson ends.
I popped over to MediaMarkt this evening to check out their collection of not-too-expensive DVD-players capable of DTS, S-video and a region-hack, but the choice was very limited, so I'll have to look further.
Cheers, K.