"Franc Zabkar" wrote in message
...
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
--

Hi Franc

I do a lot of work for a couple of companies who behave as repair agents for
the insurance companies that act to handle the guarantees for some of the
big supermarkets and "bonanza-type" electronics retail outlets. For the most
part, the cheap end stuff that they sell are just Korean or Chinese
'no-names', and it's not at all uncommon for them to employ just bog
standard computer DVD drives, which are complete with a drive electronics
board that handles all of the getting-off-the-disc of the data and primary
processing of it. A comparitively simple interface and decoding board is all
that's then necessary. I would guess that these drives are now so cheap -
and some of the ones I see come from quite famous manufacturers - that it
makes financial sense to just buy them in, and glue them together with some
simple interface electronics, to create a complete player that costs little
more than the retail price of a basic drive to go in your computer.

Arfa