On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 10:18:22 GMT, "Arfa Daily"
put finger to keyboard and composed:

From experience,
many of the cheapo brands employ a standard IDE computer-type drive,...

I'm sure I've only seen a tiny fraction of the players that you have,
but I haven't yet encountered an IDE interface in anything other than
a DVDR. It seems to me that a really cheap design would try to move
all the expensive "smarts" to the encoder PCB. Lately I've been
hacking my Tevion player (Sunplus chipset). The MPEG decoder chip does
everything including RF and servo functions (and DivX/USB/card
reader). Only an additional 5-ch motor control chip is needed to
control the spin/tray/sled motors and the focus/tracking coils. This
is despite the SPHE8202/8281 chip's ability to support ATAPI. Other
designs based on the popular MT13x9 Mediatek chipsets also seem to
prefer this approach.

- Franc Zabkar
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