Lecture on a Portable DVD Player named Boy Fun

so the other day I was looking around at my local used electronic store and I was going through their bin of old remote controls cuz sometimes you just find weird stuff in there and well I did find something weird this remote appears to go to something called a boy fun my boy come that what up it's about the silliest name I've seen on something of this sort so I was going to buy it as a gag just to show to friends and LOL at but then I walked around the back side of the table and it turned out they had the boy fun now I'd like to preface this by saying that uh I used to think it was funny to make fun of how Asian words transliterated into English in unexpected ways but nowadays I think that's pretty go uh a lot of the time you're making fun of somebody's name Etc so I don't do that so much anymore but I don't think we need to worry about this one because this thing is a sixlet that's a word I came up with to describe all the sludge that you find on like Amazon AliExpress Teemu Etc that has completely meaningless names they're between six and eight letters usually and sometimes they sort of look like Words other times they're clearly just total nonsense and it doesn't matter because they're not meant to mean anything these words only exist in order to be registered as trademarks and this is because something like I don't know 10 15 years ago Amazon started this brand registry program where you get benefits as a seller if your product has a registered us trademark now obviously this was supposed to stem the tide of slug flooding into Amazon but what it actually did predictably is resulted in a Avalanche of automated trademark registrations I mean I'm assuming they're automated I haven't seen any proof of this but I mean do we really think that a person is sitting down and coming up with these gibberish names I mean why bother at that point just have a script that generates random strings of letters or or phonemes and then simultaneously emails the US PTO the Amazon brand registry and the factory that makes the stuff I'd be shocked if it didn't work that way so my my guess is that nobody at whatever this company may have been ever saw this name except maybe the person assembling it and frankly they're lucky that the computer didn't pick worse words out of the Hat I mean it does happen so besides the silly name what exactly is this thing well it's funny if you watched my last video quick start guide end episode 2 I was just quipping in there about how I'll go to the thrift stores around here and I'll see things that look like laptops but they just turn out to be portable DVD players so yeah that's what this is and I wasn't going to buy it at first I mean despite the funny name uh but then I got to thinking about it and I realized there are a few properties about this that make it interesting to me for one thing it's absolutely enormous most portable DVD players I see are like 6 s in something like that and I actually found out that even that's big like the early ones from like 1998 when portable DVD players first became available they were like 5 in on the outside and then once you open them the screen ended up being like 3 or 4 in across I'm kind of amazed anybody ever watched a movie on one of those but this one is 15 in or or well I think the display itself might be like 14 where's my tape measure I had a tape measure here no that really is genuinely 15 in so that's the biggest display I've ever seen on one of these things like to give you an idea this is a Dell Latitude D620 of pretty reasonable business laptop from like 2005 2006 and it's kind of dwarfed by this thing you know what though dwarfed is kind of an overstatement hang on there we go this latitude is absolutely dwarfed by it now did I need to do that comparison no absolutely not but it did give me an opportunity to point out that this is called a d420 and that's the weed number and really the screen size is the most luxurious thing about it I mean this is the cheapest DVD player I've ever seen it's like $75 brand new on Amazon it doesn't weigh anything but the screen size alone actually makes it kind of appealing if you have a use for this sort of thing so I'll show you briefly how it performs and then we'll get to the stuff that I'm interested in so I'm going to plug this in but it actually does have its own built-in battery and that is something that will come up later but notice that uh even though it's plugged in and getting power it doesn't turn on because this thing actually has a physical sliding power switch you turn it on and it's on but if you turn it off it's immediately off these should be required by law so right off the bat you'll notice the problem with this huge screen it's glossy and that means that if you were thinking of using your portable DVD player outside don't I mean on top of that the off-axis viewing is just atrocious if it's not absolutely dead center vertically and horizontally you just get horrible bleed and color inversion this is no kind of IPS display okay if you're not sitting dead center to it it's pretty much useless so the images on boy fund's website that show the whole family enjoying it well those are lies but honestly if you're just intending to use this by yourself I think it's probably fine it looks pretty good when it's you know in use so let's do that when I first shot this video I used Whisper of the heart as my demo and it got blocked by Studio gibli like within seconds so instead I made my own DVD I'm sorry to disappoint you all but this is not heralding a physical release maybe someday back in 2007 the computer industry had a problem or more accurately they had two of them but only one was somebody else's fault and both had the same effect and that was computers booted really really slowly now I should say this actually looks a lot different in real life than it does on camera this is sort of the hell of attempting to demonstrate audio or video gear on YouTube for some reason the camera sees the screen as much Bluer than it actually is like I just went looked at the footage I shot and there's just this blue haze across everything that isn't there in real life like to my eyes this actually looks clear crisp fairly color accurate I I'm perfectly fine with it I would watch a movie on this it does have really high black levels and the camera also isn't showing you that it's like super gray out here but again that doesn't really bother me personally so I actually think this looks perfectly fine as long as you're sitting dead center to the screen but of course there is one problem we're both letter boxed and pillar boxed and this is a 169 video on a 169 screen so what's going on there now I thought that DVDs had their aspect ratio encoded directly into them and maybe they do but if so this thing doesn't autodetect it and you'd think there'd be a button for just quickly fixing that like an aspect or a ratio button uh but there isn't there is a zoom button on the remote but what that does is it just zooms the picture within that cropped area so that's useless what you actually have to do is to go into the setup menu go to TV display there's options here for pan and scan and letter box I don't know what those do they don't seem to do anything instead you pick wide and that makes it tall to finish you then have to go over to the panel quality setup this is where you define your brightness saturation Etc why you would need to tweak those on a panel that's built into the device is anyone's guess they should be calibrated from the factory but if we go to aspect ratio set this to 169 then combined with the other setting it looks as it should so anyway with this setup correctly like I said it looks pretty good I wouldn't mind watching a movie on this it actually looks better in real life than it does on the camera like even with this tilted down you aren't really getting the right contrast picture it's more than tolerable if you're sitting right in front of it okay the speakers as you heard uh are not the hottest uh they're kind of tiny and they don't get very loud but they're serviceable now of course much of the rest of this is incredibly cheap uh and that leads to some funny issues uh for instance you've got volume up up and down here but the M button which You' think would be mute that's actually how you access your screen controls brightness contrast Etc why would you have that in the middle of the volume control I'd guess because the person designing this and the person designing that didn't ever talk to each other there's also no play pause button instead you just have to hit the okay in the middle of the d-pad and you'll notice that doesn't do anything at first even though it's clicking it's not doing anything now I thought that might be because the the clicky part of the switch wasn't actually the switch and you had to press down harder to activate it but no you just have to hold it down for a fraction of a second this is too fast you have to hold it down just that long and then it'll go through so the processor in this thing is scanning the buttons really really really slowly another thing I like is that the latch for the door just sort of Jiggles up and down in the slot and opens at the slightest touch and there's no breaking mechanisms you can just reach in and touch your disc spinning at full speed and potentially damage it so yeah it's incredibly cheap but but there can be advantages to that for instance uh pretty much every one of these things supports a screen rotation feature you can swivel this around and now you don't have to have the bass sticking out in front you can also fold this all the way down and that makes it very convenient for viewing like in your lap in a car that sort of thing but like I said that's Universal to all of these things what I don't think that all these could do is to turn it 90° in the other direction I mean I don't know maybe this is common but at any rate it is extremely funny I mean what's the function of this what would be the situation where you would need to use the screen at a 90° angle to the base but you couldn't just turn it the other direction or turn it all the way around I don't know but I think I figured it out you see this is not necessarily useful but this is now I can hear you saying gravis what the hell are you talking about that's an incredibly stupid idea who would ever use this that way but I'm sorry you lack imagination this is a game changer for the person who wants to watch a movie while walking up until now you'd have to carry your DVD player with both hands like a hamburger but with this you can simply tuck it into the crook of your arm and now you can carry it with one hand in the correct landscape orientation as the filmmaker intended while doing something with your other hand like Doom scrolling on your phone in fact you can even bend the screen down for the optimal viewing angle this right here this is the future of Cinema so jokes and gags aside I don't think a lot of thought went into this thing but it didn't really need to right for $75 we're not expecting a masterpiece and I didn't buy it for any of those features anyway as noted I really don't need a portable DVD player but there are several other things that I do need which I think this can deliver on along the side we've got a bunch of ins and outs that are pretty common for these things the USB and SD card ports will let you put files into it and play them directly instead of using a dis there's also this game Port over here and I'm pretty sure you're supposed to be able to plug like an Xbox controller in there or something and use it to control the DVD playback but I haven't been able to get anything to work what I'm really interested in are these AV out and AV in Jacks if I'm like out in the field shooting video with an old camcorder which I don't do all that often but it does happen then I need some kind of confidence monitor I need something I can plug into the camera to see what it's output without having to stare at the tiny viewfinder or the little LCD screen well this can do that and I'll demonstrate using check off's camcorder here most old camcorders have some way to get composite video out of them and if you're lucky then yours will actually have RCA on it although this thing doesn't so what you need is one of these cables here and I'll just mention that these could be kind of inconvenient because you never know how they're wired a lot of old camcorders used this kind of plug to get video in or out and you'd have ground on the the bottom ring here and then video on the next ring and then left and right audio on the remaining ring and tip but sometimes they'd be swapped around it'd be ground left audio right audio video right there was no standard for it it was just a deao thing but the ground was always on the bottom so maybe it would swap your plugs around but it would still be usable well when Apple released the video iPod sometime in the 2000s they decided to use a cable just like this except the video is on the base and then the ground is on the second ring and that means that there's no way to swap these plugs around to make it work because video is on the shield here now what I've been told is that Raspberry Pi's adopted the iPod video style pinout so any cable that works for one of those should work but of course it's never labeled so you just have to own both of them and try each one until you find one that works irritating so if I put this in AV in mode turn my camera on all right we got a picture on the camera there but if I plug the yellow into the yellow we get this horrible 60 HZ hum because it's interpreting the video as an audio signal for this particular cable the video ended up on the red plug so this actually doesn't look half bad if you compare to the LCD on the camera it's mirrored cuz the camera does that but it actually looks pretty good and it's 60 FPS there's no like weird de interlacing artifacts or anything so I would consider this perfectly adequate for any sort of field monitoring application especially since as noted it runs off battery so I don't need to find anywhere to plug it in so for this purpose it works absolutely perfectly and I think it'll be a useful tool in my repertoire I mean the fact that I can have a composite monitor that I could just walk around and hold in one hand is pretty neat that's not a thing that I had before and now that I think about it for $75 I I don't really know of anything else you could buy that that delivers this I mean with the built-in battery and everything so if you're doing anything with composite video you might actually want to buy one of these just ignore the DVD part completely okay so that's terrific but what about about the AV out feature well that's useful too if I'm doing a video about a piece of video gear a a video switcher an effects processor a PC with a capture card something like that I need a source of composite video and I don't want to just use a camera because then I've got to point it at myself and worry about how it's framed and whether it's in focus and whatnot and I could plug in a VCR but you know the tape is eventually going to run out and I'm not going to notice that and Rewind it and hit play so it's just going to be sitting there dead for half the video this has happened before not to mention the fact that you're putting extra hours on the mechanism and that sucks so what I really want is a digital source of analog video and this can do that if we pop this over to the AV outjack and then put our camcorder in VCR mode there's the picture and this will output whatever's on the screen so we could use a DVD like Yay but like I said I'd prefer to use a solid state input like a USB or SD card so I've got one of those here it gives us this little file browser interface and here's all the files it thinks it can read if we go in and pick this file here and there it is the composite output looks pretty damn good and there is a repeat feature so this will do exactly what I want uh I can use this as a continuous source of analog video there's no fans there's no parts to fail it can run it off wall current or off its internal battery so I don't need to plug it in it'll just output composite video all day long forever but there's a problem notice I skipped over all these files to get down to that one why didn't I play the cat video we all love cat videos well let's give that a shot H unless James Burke has a cat for Sona this is not the video I intended I've got cat I've got House MD I've got a fist full of dollars and these are MP4 M and I think Avi and they're all h264 and it just skipped over all of them and played the first one that doesn't have a question mark icon so what's all that about well here's the thing this is a very very very old video rip which which I made myself from a DVD I owned this is my backup copy this video was probably encoded in like 2004 2005 when the most popular video Codec was MPEG 4 but I'm not talking about MP4 the container format that we still use today I mean MPEG for visual the codec from like 1990 8 that was all the rage for a while until it got replaced by h264 now most of us only knew this under the names WMV or divix and I figure if you're under like I don't know 25 years old you've probably never heard of either one and that's good because they sucked and we switched to h264 as soon as it became available pretty much overnight everything switched to it virtually every piece of random AliExpress crap has been able to play h264 for well over 10 years which says really disturbing things about what might be inside this device if it can't for more deeply disturbing implications let's try and view a picture so this one does okay I mean it doesn't look very good but it's also a really really old digital photo so it only takes a moment to appear uh but you'll notice that I hit pause immediately that's because as soon as you pick a JPEG this goes into a slideshow mode that's really really fast like it advances to the next picture in about a half a second it's useless and you'd think there'd be a way to adjust that but there isn't I've gone through the entire setup menu and there's nothing in here that even mentions that slideshow feature so that's silly and inconvenient but it gets a lot worse if we look at a JPEG that's not from 1998 we're loading we're still loading we're still loading and there it is now you might be thinking that this is some terapixel image like I took a a 50 megapixel jpeg out of my phone and fed it in here no no this is a 384 Koby jpeg it's like 1102 by 860 this thing just struggles to load it and if we advance to another picture here every picture just takes so long to load okay here we go so this is a picture that I took on my phone it is fairly high resolution and if we zoom in here you can see that the Fidelity is incredibly low it's very clearly being imported into a really low resolution buffer if we put this next to the original photo you can see that this text that should say caution is just utterly illegible like I said these are still being actively sold on Amazon and boy fund's website is only a couple years old it was only registered in 2018 and archive.org says there wasn't a site there until 2020 so this was made sometime within the last 4 years and yet it doesn't support any codec newer than EG for and it takes 10 seconds to display a low resolution JPEG but let's put another thing on the pile that it can't do very well I'm in the middle of editing right now and I showed my footage to some people and a couple of them recognized that this port layout is actually quite common in other super cheap like all the express DVD players and so they actually knew what this game Port was for it is not at all what I thought it was I've put some new files on this drive let's go get one of them here we go [Music] so yeah uh it probably goes without saying but those were not videos those were NES ROMs and this thing cannot run them very well even if you're not much of a gamer you can probably tell that these games aren't running nearly as fast as they should be they're obviously running in an emulator that's very CPU starved they look completely unplayable not that I can prove that however because I don't have a controller that works with this I had assumed that that game Port would work with you know any old USB game controller maybe an Xbox 360 pad something like that but everything I've plugged in there doesn't work and I've started to think that it might be proprietary that seems kind of silly with like a generic sixlet device but hear me out like I said uh this particular DVD controller board is used in hundreds or thousands of different devices going back a long long time as as we'll address at the end of the video and I think that that Port is not actually USB but is in fact like an NES controller or something like that that's just using the USB plug because it's convenient because I've actually seen these DVD players with built-in NES emulators before I just forgot that I'd seen them and they all use the exact same controller and it is truly horrible I've actually handled one of these before it's got like rubber buttons it just feels terrible so of course I always threw them away whenever I came across one and naturally I wish I hadn't now not that it would make any difference right because this is pretty clearly unplayably slow I don't think I'm missing much okay so it can't play videos well can't display images well can't play video games well what can it do well other than play DVDs it can at least play mp3s although I didn't feel like going in digging up some royalty-free music so I just grabbed something off my hard drive that wouldn't get content ided and for some reason it was this I'm sorry to hear that Humanity has faced such a catastrophic event in regards to hot wirring a car it's important to understand that the process may very depending on the make and model of the vehicle your guess is as good as mine as to why I had that file or where it came from but at any rate this thing plays MP3s just fine there's no severe delays or anything like that it even has that little animated Spectrum analyzer I love that I wish were full screen but I'm not going to complain this thing struggles with every format that it claims to support but there's one more you haven't seen yet that it does even worse at and that's actually text files I have no idea why this can display text files I I mean I'm for it right like everything with a CPU should be able to do this but what were they imagining people doing I guess it doesn't matter because it doesn't actually work if you pull it up like well that's obviously hosed this is clearly trying to draw a box around the text but it's offset from the left incorrectly so the right side's just being lost and then some of the text is actually wrapping around being drawn on the left side but it's not even being drawn correctly cuz see if you scroll you can see that there's bits of old and new text all being mixed together so this isn't actually being blanked clearly this doesn't work right this is an unfinished feature that that never functioned and it's bizarre that it's even in here right if it didn't work you'd think they'd have just turned it off or you'd think they just wouldn't have developed it in the first place but that's not actually what's interesting what's interesting is the icon that icon is to my eyes just an inverted version of the windows true type font icon I mean it's not quite right like if you invert that you get a different set of colors entirely but I'm pretty sure that somebody just reached into the windows folder and pulled out that icon cuz they wanted something that vaguely represented text uh and then did something to it like ran the Photoshop find edges filter or whatever and then you know shoved it into the firmware and this is not shocking in itself I have seen this done many times with super cheap electronics they'll just rip off images usually from Windows XP this is actually surprisingly outdated so there would be nothing remarkable about this at all except that we've seen it before in the video I mentioned earlier quick start guide end episode 2 when I was showing off the aitech laptop that had the built-in DVD player chip somebody pointed out in the comments that if you look in the OSD sure enough there's a ripped Windows 95 true type font icon now it wouldn't be shocking at all to learn that this had counterfeit Electronics in it uh made by somebody who doesn't care about ripping off files straight out of Windows but for both devices to have ripped off the exact same icon instead of going with like the text file icon which you'd think would be more recognizable than the technical incorrect font one that feels too coincidental right and it makes you wonder in the aitech video I talked about how the chip that was in that laptop was literally meant to go in devices like this and its function was to be the cheapest possible way to bring a device like this into existence it's just a fully integrated chip that does absolutely everything you need talks to the drive talks to the screen talks to your audio Hardware everything so wouldn't it be funny if you you know a day after publishing that video I walked into a store and found another device that used the exact same chip well I took a look in there to find out if that were the case and minor spoiler it's not but it also kind of sort of is so I'm going to take this apart again on camera show you what's in there and then I'll tell you the punch line this thing comes apart super easy just spin out all the screws now unsurprisingly this is the kind of device where uh if you separate the two halves without thinking too hard uh you can completely destroy it so let's make sure there's no disc in there okay good and then if you just try and pop the bottom off you'll tear all the cables AP so you have to carefully lift the top up here oh already broke something and then flip that over like that and disconnect that lead and now we can lay it down what was this this was the IR window up here actually not entirely sure what was holding that in oh I see there's three little Stakes there and they match up with the little tiny holes in the plastic here wow those did not do a very good job oh got it terrific so this is built pretty much exactly like you'd expect uh the bottom is an absolute featherweight it's clearly mostly air all the actual mass of this thing is just in that LCD panel surprising nobody flying leads everywhere almost no cable management stuff just taped down and if you were to gently pull on any of these you'd just rip a connector right off the board I'm sure but hey you're not supposed to take it apart the cdrom mechanism here obviously bought from somebody else sits on these little silicone supports here so it's not actually held in by anything I mean they probably could have put a screw through one or three of these but that would have cost money so they didn't there's just a matching plastic pegs on the top here uh which means as you're taking it apart this whole mechanism can just fall out terrific I'm also a really big fan of what they did with the LEDs this is a level of cost cutting that's kind of new to me they've just left the legs on these LEDs untrimmed uh and then just bent them down at the end slded them into the board and then slid heat shrink over them so the leads don't Bridge together when the thing vibrates and that's it there's there's no like matching hole in the casting that the other end of the LED slots into they just sort of um they just sort of lay here and that's it the best thing they did was you know bend the IR receiver up a little bit so we can see through the window uh but what I find really entertaining here is instead of casting some kind of Boss into the bottom shell to hold these at the right level which to be clear is essentially free they're already making the rest of the plastic casting right so what would it have cost them to have a couple little little bosses like this just to hold those up they've instead just used a a like a sticky back piece of foam to hold them at the right level and that's good enough the window in the front isn't even labeled so I guess it doesn't really matter where they are left to right and this saved you know 3 or 4 seconds of assembly time so that's good enough and hey you know at least they bothered to Like Glue in the terrible speakers and I don't know why this is exactly but they've actually silk screened these pcbs indicating where you're supposed to put the screws I guess it's kind of a weird depiction of a screw if so but Sony does this they indicate uh every single screw on the chassis of their device that you need to take out to get the thing open uh which is Handy for taking it apart I'm not really sure what this is supposed to indicate I guess it's for the assembly person to tell them not to put a screw there I suppose and they've actually bothered to label the pins on the connectors so yeah a little more effort than you'd necessarily expect for something this cheap and one other thing they didn't strictly speaking need to do is they actually put some fish paper over the battery which you know lithiumion batteries are little hand grenades that we put in our pockets and carry around with us so you it doesn't make it incredibly safe but it's a little safer than it absolutely needed to be especially cuz there's a decent amount of power down there I I don't want to try and get this off cuz I started trying to peel it it just starts falling apart and I don't think these are going to be labeled and if they are they won't be labeled honestly so I don't know what the capacity of these battery packs is but they're about yay big and there's two of them there's at least twice as much volume to those packs as there is in like a typical smartphone battery and if those are like what 6 to 8 Amp hours then there's probably 10 to 15 amp hours here if these are at all reasonable battery packs and given that your typical like DVD player s so pulls like a watt other than the backlight and the motor in the drive there's not a lot of power consumption in here so it's very possible this thing would run for just hours and hours and hours on a charge now to that end I have no idea if that's true because there's no indication in the on-screen display of the battery charge status of this device you'd think that it would show a battery icon on the menu or it would show you when it's charging uh it doesn't and I have not managed to run down the battery in this thing yet so I don't know what happens when it runs out of juice but my guess is it just turns off and I'm guessing that because I don't think they went with a DVD player chip that knows that it's in a portable device like I said earlier this is not using an ESS video drive it has a mediatech Mt 1389 vdu a completely different chip from a completely different company at least in theory but we'll come back to that it is at least the same kind of thing it's a single chip DVD player solution does you know decoding and displaying all these different formats and handles audio and the whole nine yards all you have to do is give it a couple support chips and Bam you got yourself a DVD player now I don't know what the vdu suffix means I looked this up and there were a whole bunch of variants among them a portable version the Mt 1389 P so presumably that would have like the battery charge level meter that I was talking about but for all I know the vdu rolls all those variants into one that's not uncommon so maybe this supports it they just didn't bother turning it on what I can tell you is that this chip is potentially very very old the Mt 1389 data sheet is stamped 2006 and while I don't know if this one's newer than that honestly I'd be surprised if anybody was really working on DVD player chips after that point in time because Blu-ray had just come out and while that didn't immediately halt all sales of DVD players I mean duh I figured that most R&D work probably pivoted to the new technology because if somebody was expecting new features they wouldn't be buying a DVD player right right at least that's how I think the manufacturers would have seen it so this chip is potentially 18 years old and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was literally sitting in a drum of chips in like the shenzen electronics mall for pretty much that whole time either that or it's just been in continuous production for nearly 20 years neither one would surprise me too much so this chip is probably very old and that would explain why this thing is so dog slow it does have a CPU in there and I don't have any specs on it the data sheet doesn't talk about it really at all other than to suggest that it's 32-bit risk so it's probably an arm core from 2006 that was you know a few pennies at the time to manufacture I'm going to guess that it's like 150 mahz something like that not very impressive by the standards of any time so that's obviously why the menus and image loading and whatnot is so dog slow the only part of this that's efficient is the stuff that's being offloaded to the dedicated decoding course the D Sheet's very proud of its MPEG 4 capabilities and its USB 2.0 capabilities and the other state-of-the-art Technologies but I don't think they had a dedicated jpeg core on there but how about that NES mode I mean that was super slow too but could it really be running on the mediatech chip like on the DVD decoder well I don't really have any other explanation cuz there's nowhere else it could really live like there's certainly a lot of devices made over the last couple decades that have had an NES clone chip also called a famic clone tucked into a corner somewhere and theoretically they could have put one of those on here and then when you load a ROM it just like switches the video input over to that or whatever but well they didn't I mean you can tell they didn't because it runs like crap right if it was a f clone it would not necessarily be a perfect simulation of an NES but it would at least run at the right speed this is clearly running on a processor somewhere and the only one I can find is in the mediate Tech I've identified pretty much all the chips on here this guy is an audio amplifier uh this is a bunch of power circuitry including the battery charge controller right there uh down here you've got an lvds driver that's for controlling the LCD this guy I can't identify without peeling off the sticker and I was messing it up trying to do that but I'm pretty positive from the outline and the position that it's SD ram because the mediatech chip requires RAM and there's no other chips on here they could be doing that uh then this is kind of interesting I don't know about any of this stuff but I was kind of surprised to find that this is a motor spindle controller for the DVD ROM mechanism I had assumed it would all be integrated into one package you know you would just give it like power and serial control signals and it would spit out data but apparently no I I guess a couple of these wires down here must go to the motor spindle and then it gets controlled by a chip the vendor provides that's probably normal but it just seemed weird to me uh and then there's a nor flash chip over here that's presumably where the firmware for the mediatech lives and that's it that's that's everything uh the whole device is just those chips there's nothing else on here with a processor I'm going to flip this over and show you the back side of the board just to to be clear there's nothing back here other than traces and test points and actually a whole bunch of labels again this is labeled much better than I expected uh everything here uh from the DC input the LCD um I think backlight output uh the composite input and output and then a whole bunch of signals for I think the the DVD ROM as well as the LED pins everything is labeled and presumably the test points are for automated testing but the labels must be for human eyes right so this was actually designed with the notion that a person might actually sit down and try and troubleshoot it and that's kind of wild to me you'd think this kind of board is being churned out by the millions specifically for for this kind of device and thus you know the expectation is they're going to test one during manufacturing if it doesn't work they're just going to throw it away right who's going to bother to come back with an oscilloscope or a multimeter and and poke at things right like by the time you've had a human being lay a hand on this thing you've already lost money on it right so I have to assume that whoever designed this board was actually trying to do you know a good job which is kind of shocking with this sort of uh hyper cheap electronics but to go back to the NES for a moment I'm kind of curious how that emulator got in there as it were there's no information in the data sheet for the Mt 1389 about programming it yourself about providing your own software it barely even mentions that there's a c U there's there's no description of its capabilities you know bus width nothing so it it kind of feels like maybe these things just came with firmware and you just used it so maybe mediatech actually built in that NES feature themselves I don't know but let's talk about mediatech and firmware for a moment going back to the mystery of the true type font icon is there a connection between ESS and mediatech yes and a really weird one because in 2003 ESS sued them for stealing apparently their firmware it's not clear to me whether it's just like the UI or if it was actually the whole firmware but I suspect it was because uh they actually succeeded they settled they got $45 million from mediatech and in return they granted them a license to continue using their firmware on their devices so it seems to follow then that the mediatech chips at least at some point must have been clones of the video drive because they were using the video Drive firmware and that makes me wonder if ESS stole the true type font icon to begin with and then mediatech stole it from them I mean it's entirely possible that neither company was responsible mediatech may not have developed the final UI for this thing maybe whoever assembled this board customized the firmware and that's when they injected it and maybe the same thing happened uh with whoever MSI bought the firmware from uh for the ACH laptop cuz I'm sure they didn't develop it themselves this could still be a total coincidence virtually everybody has that file lurking on their computer and it's so easy to just grab that instead of finding a source for legal stock imagery but it was still amusing to find out that this connection existed I mean not as amusing as the name of the final product but what can you do so that's the end of the video and I'm really glad because this was such a SLO to put together I was not planning on there being any real narrative to this I just I thought the name of the thing was funny and the video put was neat and I had a couple jokes about like the weird firmware and that was it and then like a few minutes before I started shooting I found out about the stolen firmware business and I'm like well I got to work that in and then over the course of shooting and editing I just kept learning new things about it and having to go back and shoot new sequences to insert uh and the result to me just feels like this bizarre Patchwork quilt of disjointed clips and I hope it doesn't feel that way to you but uh hopefully you enjoyed yourself and if you did uh it'd be cool if you could subscribe uh to let me know I didn't didn't screw up too bad uh but if you really want to help me out then consider supporting me on patreon like these people are doing because without them I couldn't do any of this I mean this is my full-time job so I couldn't like you know buy groceries or put gas in my car or anything uh but in addition I wouldn't be able to buy you know weird stuff like this this was like 50 bucks and I had no idea if there was going to be anything to it uh but fortunately uh my supporters have put their faith in me to just buy things and find out if there's something to say about them and it works out far more often than I would expect so I want to thank all my patrons for believing in me I'm incredibly grateful and everyone else thanks for watching

so the other day I was looking around at my local used electronic store and I was going through their bin of old remote controls cuz sometimes you just find weird stuff in there and well I did find something weird this remote appears to go to something called a boy fun my boy come that what up it&#39;s about the silliest name I&#39;ve seen on something of this sort so I was going to buy it as a gag just to show to friends and LOL at but then I walked around the back side of the table and it turned out they had the boy fun now I&#39;d like to preface this by saying that uh I used to think it was funny to make fun of how Asian words transliterated into English in unexpected ways but nowadays I think that&#39;s pretty go uh a lot of the time you&#39;re making fun of somebody&#39;s name Etc so I don&#39;t do that so much anymore but I don&#39;t think we need to worry about this one because this thing is a sixlet that&#39;s a word I came up with to describe all the sludge that you find on like Amazon AliExpress Teemu Etc that has completely meaningless names they&#39;re between six and eight letters usually and sometimes they sort of look like Words other times they&#39;re clearly just total nonsense and it doesn&#39;t matter because they&#39;re not meant to mean anything these words only exist in order to be registered as trademarks and this is because something like I don&#39;t know 10 15 years ago Amazon started this brand registry program where you get benefits as a seller if your product has a registered us trademark now obviously this was supposed to stem the tide of slug flooding into Amazon but what it actually did predictably is resulted in a Avalanche of automated trademark registrations I mean I&#39;m assuming they&#39;re automated I haven&#39;t seen any proof of this but I mean do we really think that a person is sitting down and coming up with these gibberish names I mean why bother at that point just have a script that generates random strings of letters or or phonemes and then simultaneously emails the US PTO the Amazon brand registry and the factory that makes the stuff I&#39;d be shocked if it didn&#39;t work that way so my my guess is that nobody at whatever this company may have been ever saw this name except maybe the person assembling it and frankly they&#39;re lucky that the computer didn&#39;t pick worse words out of the Hat I mean it does happen so besides the silly name what exactly is this thing well it&#39;s funny if you watched my last video quick start guide end episode 2 I was just quipping in there about how I&#39;ll go to the thrift stores around here and I&#39;ll see things that look like laptops but they just turn out to be portable DVD players so yeah that&#39;s what this is and I wasn&#39;t going to buy it at first I mean despite the funny name uh but then I got to thinking about it and I realized there are a few properties about this that make it interesting to me for one thing it&#39;s absolutely enormous most portable DVD players I see are like 6 s in something like that and I actually found out that even that&#39;s big like the early ones from like 1998 when portable DVD players first became available they were like 5 in on the outside and then once you open them the screen ended up being like 3 or 4 in across I&#39;m kind of amazed anybody ever watched a movie on one of those but this one is 15 in or or well I think the display itself might be like 14 where&#39;s my tape measure I had a tape measure here no that really is genuinely 15 in so that&#39;s the biggest display I&#39;ve ever seen on one of these things like to give you an idea this is a Dell Latitude D620 of pretty reasonable business laptop from like 2005 2006 and it&#39;s kind of dwarfed by this thing you know what though dwarfed is kind of an overstatement hang on there we go this latitude is absolutely dwarfed by it now did I need to do that comparison no absolutely not but it did give me an opportunity to point out that this is called a d420 and that&#39;s the weed number and really the screen size is the most luxurious thing about it I mean this is the cheapest DVD player I&#39;ve ever seen it&#39;s like $75 brand new on Amazon it doesn&#39;t weigh anything but the screen size alone actually makes it kind of appealing if you have a use for this sort of thing so I&#39;ll show you briefly how it performs and then we&#39;ll get to the stuff that I&#39;m interested in so I&#39;m going to plug this in but it actually does have its own built-in battery and that is something that will come up later but notice that uh even though it&#39;s plugged in and getting power it doesn&#39;t turn on because this thing actually has a physical sliding power switch you turn it on and it&#39;s on but if you turn it off it&#39;s immediately off these should be required by law so right off the bat you&#39;ll notice the problem with this huge screen it&#39;s glossy and that means that if you were thinking of using your portable DVD player outside don&#39;t I mean on top of that the off-axis viewing is just atrocious if it&#39;s not absolutely dead center vertically and horizontally you just get horrible bleed and color inversion this is no kind of IPS display okay if you&#39;re not sitting dead center to it it&#39;s pretty much useless so the images on boy fund&#39;s website that show the whole family enjoying it well those are lies but honestly if you&#39;re just intending to use this by yourself I think it&#39;s probably fine it looks pretty good when it&#39;s you know in use so let&#39;s do that when I first shot this video I used Whisper of the heart as my demo and it got blocked by Studio gibli like within seconds so instead I made my own DVD I&#39;m sorry to disappoint you all but this is not heralding a physical release maybe someday back in 2007 the computer industry had a problem or more accurately they had two of them but only one was somebody else&#39;s fault and both had the same effect and that was computers booted really really slowly now I should say this actually looks a lot different in real life than it does on camera this is sort of the hell of attempting to demonstrate audio or video gear on YouTube for some reason the camera sees the screen as much Bluer than it actually is like I just went looked at the footage I shot and there&#39;s just this blue haze across everything that isn&#39;t there in real life like to my eyes this actually looks clear crisp fairly color accurate I I&#39;m perfectly fine with it I would watch a movie on this it does have really high black levels and the camera also isn&#39;t showing you that it&#39;s like super gray out here but again that doesn&#39;t really bother me personally so I actually think this looks perfectly fine as long as you&#39;re sitting dead center to the screen but of course there is one problem we&#39;re both letter boxed and pillar boxed and this is a 169 video on a 169 screen so what&#39;s going on there now I thought that DVDs had their aspect ratio encoded directly into them and maybe they do but if so this thing doesn&#39;t autodetect it and you&#39;d think there&#39;d be a button for just quickly fixing that like an aspect or a ratio button uh but there isn&#39;t there is a zoom button on the remote but what that does is it just zooms the picture within that cropped area so that&#39;s useless what you actually have to do is to go into the setup menu go to TV display there&#39;s options here for pan and scan and letter box I don&#39;t know what those do they don&#39;t seem to do anything instead you pick wide and that makes it tall to finish you then have to go over to the panel quality setup this is where you define your brightness saturation Etc why you would need to tweak those on a panel that&#39;s built into the device is anyone&#39;s guess they should be calibrated from the factory but if we go to aspect ratio set this to 169 then combined with the other setting it looks as it should so anyway with this setup correctly like I said it looks pretty good I wouldn&#39;t mind watching a movie on this it actually looks better in real life than it does on the camera like even with this tilted down you aren&#39;t really getting the right contrast picture it&#39;s more than tolerable if you&#39;re sitting right in front of it okay the speakers as you heard uh are not the hottest uh they&#39;re kind of tiny and they don&#39;t get very loud but they&#39;re serviceable now of course much of the rest of this is incredibly cheap uh and that leads to some funny issues uh for instance you&#39;ve got volume up up and down here but the M button which You&#39; think would be mute that&#39;s actually how you access your screen controls brightness contrast Etc why would you have that in the middle of the volume control I&#39;d guess because the person designing this and the person designing that didn&#39;t ever talk to each other there&#39;s also no play pause button instead you just have to hit the okay in the middle of the d-pad and you&#39;ll notice that doesn&#39;t do anything at first even though it&#39;s clicking it&#39;s not doing anything now I thought that might be because the the clicky part of the switch wasn&#39;t actually the switch and you had to press down harder to activate it but no you just have to hold it down for a fraction of a second this is too fast you have to hold it down just that long and then it&#39;ll go through so the processor in this thing is scanning the buttons really really really slowly another thing I like is that the latch for the door just sort of Jiggles up and down in the slot and opens at the slightest touch and there&#39;s no breaking mechanisms you can just reach in and touch your disc spinning at full speed and potentially damage it so yeah it&#39;s incredibly cheap but but there can be advantages to that for instance uh pretty much every one of these things supports a screen rotation feature you can swivel this around and now you don&#39;t have to have the bass sticking out in front you can also fold this all the way down and that makes it very convenient for viewing like in your lap in a car that sort of thing but like I said that&#39;s Universal to all of these things what I don&#39;t think that all these could do is to turn it 90° in the other direction I mean I don&#39;t know maybe this is common but at any rate it is extremely funny I mean what&#39;s the function of this what would be the situation where you would need to use the screen at a 90° angle to the base but you couldn&#39;t just turn it the other direction or turn it all the way around I don&#39;t know but I think I figured it out you see this is not necessarily useful but this is now I can hear you saying gravis what the hell are you talking about that&#39;s an incredibly stupid idea who would ever use this that way but I&#39;m sorry you lack imagination this is a game changer for the person who wants to watch a movie while walking up until now you&#39;d have to carry your DVD player with both hands like a hamburger but with this you can simply tuck it into the crook of your arm and now you can carry it with one hand in the correct landscape orientation as the filmmaker intended while doing something with your other hand like Doom scrolling on your phone in fact you can even bend the screen down for the optimal viewing angle this right here this is the future of Cinema so jokes and gags aside I don&#39;t think a lot of thought went into this thing but it didn&#39;t really need to right for $75 we&#39;re not expecting a masterpiece and I didn&#39;t buy it for any of those features anyway as noted I really don&#39;t need a portable DVD player but there are several other things that I do need which I think this can deliver on along the side we&#39;ve got a bunch of ins and outs that are pretty common for these things the USB and SD card ports will let you put files into it and play them directly instead of using a dis there&#39;s also this game Port over here and I&#39;m pretty sure you&#39;re supposed to be able to plug like an Xbox controller in there or something and use it to control the DVD playback but I haven&#39;t been able to get anything to work what I&#39;m really interested in are these AV out and AV in Jacks if I&#39;m like out in the field shooting video with an old camcorder which I don&#39;t do all that often but it does happen then I need some kind of confidence monitor I need something I can plug into the camera to see what it&#39;s output without having to stare at the tiny viewfinder or the little LCD screen well this can do that and I&#39;ll demonstrate using check off&#39;s camcorder here most old camcorders have some way to get composite video out of them and if you&#39;re lucky then yours will actually have RCA on it although this thing doesn&#39;t so what you need is one of these cables here and I&#39;ll just mention that these could be kind of inconvenient because you never know how they&#39;re wired a lot of old camcorders used this kind of plug to get video in or out and you&#39;d have ground on the the bottom ring here and then video on the next ring and then left and right audio on the remaining ring and tip but sometimes they&#39;d be swapped around it&#39;d be ground left audio right audio video right there was no standard for it it was just a deao thing but the ground was always on the bottom so maybe it would swap your plugs around but it would still be usable well when Apple released the video iPod sometime in the 2000s they decided to use a cable just like this except the video is on the base and then the ground is on the second ring and that means that there&#39;s no way to swap these plugs around to make it work because video is on the shield here now what I&#39;ve been told is that Raspberry Pi&#39;s adopted the iPod video style pinout so any cable that works for one of those should work but of course it&#39;s never labeled so you just have to own both of them and try each one until you find one that works irritating so if I put this in AV in mode turn my camera on all right we got a picture on the camera there but if I plug the yellow into the yellow we get this horrible 60 HZ hum because it&#39;s interpreting the video as an audio signal for this particular cable the video ended up on the red plug so this actually doesn&#39;t look half bad if you compare to the LCD on the camera it&#39;s mirrored cuz the camera does that but it actually looks pretty good and it&#39;s 60 FPS there&#39;s no like weird de interlacing artifacts or anything so I would consider this perfectly adequate for any sort of field monitoring application especially since as noted it runs off battery so I don&#39;t need to find anywhere to plug it in so for this purpose it works absolutely perfectly and I think it&#39;ll be a useful tool in my repertoire I mean the fact that I can have a composite monitor that I could just walk around and hold in one hand is pretty neat that&#39;s not a thing that I had before and now that I think about it for $75 I I don&#39;t really know of anything else you could buy that that delivers this I mean with the built-in battery and everything so if you&#39;re doing anything with composite video you might actually want to buy one of these just ignore the DVD part completely okay so that&#39;s terrific but what about about the AV out feature well that&#39;s useful too if I&#39;m doing a video about a piece of video gear a a video switcher an effects processor a PC with a capture card something like that I need a source of composite video and I don&#39;t want to just use a camera because then I&#39;ve got to point it at myself and worry about how it&#39;s framed and whether it&#39;s in focus and whatnot and I could plug in a VCR but you know the tape is eventually going to run out and I&#39;m not going to notice that and Rewind it and hit play so it&#39;s just going to be sitting there dead for half the video this has happened before not to mention the fact that you&#39;re putting extra hours on the mechanism and that sucks so what I really want is a digital source of analog video and this can do that if we pop this over to the AV outjack and then put our camcorder in VCR mode there&#39;s the picture and this will output whatever&#39;s on the screen so we could use a DVD like Yay but like I said I&#39;d prefer to use a solid state input like a USB or SD card so I&#39;ve got one of those here it gives us this little file browser interface and here&#39;s all the files it thinks it can read if we go in and pick this file here and there it is the composite output looks pretty damn good and there is a repeat feature so this will do exactly what I want uh I can use this as a continuous source of analog video there&#39;s no fans there&#39;s no parts to fail it can run it off wall current or off its internal battery so I don&#39;t need to plug it in it&#39;ll just output composite video all day long forever but there&#39;s a problem notice I skipped over all these files to get down to that one why didn&#39;t I play the cat video we all love cat videos well let&#39;s give that a shot H unless James Burke has a cat for Sona this is not the video I intended I&#39;ve got cat I&#39;ve got House MD I&#39;ve got a fist full of dollars and these are MP4 M and I think Avi and they&#39;re all h264 and it just skipped over all of them and played the first one that doesn&#39;t have a question mark icon so what&#39;s all that about well here&#39;s the thing this is a very very very old video rip which which I made myself from a DVD I owned this is my backup copy this video was probably encoded in like 2004 2005 when the most popular video Codec was MPEG 4 but I&#39;m not talking about MP4 the container format that we still use today I mean MPEG for visual the codec from like 1990 8 that was all the rage for a while until it got replaced by h264 now most of us only knew this under the names WMV or divix and I figure if you&#39;re under like I don&#39;t know 25 years old you&#39;ve probably never heard of either one and that&#39;s good because they sucked and we switched to h264 as soon as it became available pretty much overnight everything switched to it virtually every piece of random AliExpress crap has been able to play h264 for well over 10 years which says really disturbing things about what might be inside this device if it can&#39;t for more deeply disturbing implications let&#39;s try and view a picture so this one does okay I mean it doesn&#39;t look very good but it&#39;s also a really really old digital photo so it only takes a moment to appear uh but you&#39;ll notice that I hit pause immediately that&#39;s because as soon as you pick a JPEG this goes into a slideshow mode that&#39;s really really fast like it advances to the next picture in about a half a second it&#39;s useless and you&#39;d think there&#39;d be a way to adjust that but there isn&#39;t I&#39;ve gone through the entire setup menu and there&#39;s nothing in here that even mentions that slideshow feature so that&#39;s silly and inconvenient but it gets a lot worse if we look at a JPEG that&#39;s not from 1998 we&#39;re loading we&#39;re still loading we&#39;re still loading and there it is now you might be thinking that this is some terapixel image like I took a a 50 megapixel jpeg out of my phone and fed it in here no no this is a 384 Koby jpeg it&#39;s like 1102 by 860 this thing just struggles to load it and if we advance to another picture here every picture just takes so long to load okay here we go so this is a picture that I took on my phone it is fairly high resolution and if we zoom in here you can see that the Fidelity is incredibly low it&#39;s very clearly being imported into a really low resolution buffer if we put this next to the original photo you can see that this text that should say caution is just utterly illegible like I said these are still being actively sold on Amazon and boy fund&#39;s website is only a couple years old it was only registered in 2018 and archive.org says there wasn&#39;t a site there until 2020 so this was made sometime within the last 4 years and yet it doesn&#39;t support any codec newer than EG for and it takes 10 seconds to display a low resolution JPEG but let&#39;s put another thing on the pile that it can&#39;t do very well I&#39;m in the middle of editing right now and I showed my footage to some people and a couple of them recognized that this port layout is actually quite common in other super cheap like all the express DVD players and so they actually knew what this game Port was for it is not at all what I thought it was I&#39;ve put some new files on this drive let&#39;s go get one of them here we go [Music] so yeah uh it probably goes without saying but those were not videos those were NES ROMs and this thing cannot run them very well even if you&#39;re not much of a gamer you can probably tell that these games aren&#39;t running nearly as fast as they should be they&#39;re obviously running in an emulator that&#39;s very CPU starved they look completely unplayable not that I can prove that however because I don&#39;t have a controller that works with this I had assumed that that game Port would work with you know any old USB game controller maybe an Xbox 360 pad something like that but everything I&#39;ve plugged in there doesn&#39;t work and I&#39;ve started to think that it might be proprietary that seems kind of silly with like a generic sixlet device but hear me out like I said uh this particular DVD controller board is used in hundreds or thousands of different devices going back a long long time as as we&#39;ll address at the end of the video and I think that that Port is not actually USB but is in fact like an NES controller or something like that that&#39;s just using the USB plug because it&#39;s convenient because I&#39;ve actually seen these DVD players with built-in NES emulators before I just forgot that I&#39;d seen them and they all use the exact same controller and it is truly horrible I&#39;ve actually handled one of these before it&#39;s got like rubber buttons it just feels terrible so of course I always threw them away whenever I came across one and naturally I wish I hadn&#39;t now not that it would make any difference right because this is pretty clearly unplayably slow I don&#39;t think I&#39;m missing much okay so it can&#39;t play videos well can&#39;t display images well can&#39;t play video games well what can it do well other than play DVDs it can at least play mp3s although I didn&#39;t feel like going in digging up some royalty-free music so I just grabbed something off my hard drive that wouldn&#39;t get content ided and for some reason it was this I&#39;m sorry to hear that Humanity has faced such a catastrophic event in regards to hot wirring a car it&#39;s important to understand that the process may very depending on the make and model of the vehicle your guess is as good as mine as to why I had that file or where it came from but at any rate this thing plays MP3s just fine there&#39;s no severe delays or anything like that it even has that little animated Spectrum analyzer I love that I wish were full screen but I&#39;m not going to complain this thing struggles with every format that it claims to support but there&#39;s one more you haven&#39;t seen yet that it does even worse at and that&#39;s actually text files I have no idea why this can display text files I I mean I&#39;m for it right like everything with a CPU should be able to do this but what were they imagining people doing I guess it doesn&#39;t matter because it doesn&#39;t actually work if you pull it up like well that&#39;s obviously hosed this is clearly trying to draw a box around the text but it&#39;s offset from the left incorrectly so the right side&#39;s just being lost and then some of the text is actually wrapping around being drawn on the left side but it&#39;s not even being drawn correctly cuz see if you scroll you can see that there&#39;s bits of old and new text all being mixed together so this isn&#39;t actually being blanked clearly this doesn&#39;t work right this is an unfinished feature that that never functioned and it&#39;s bizarre that it&#39;s even in here right if it didn&#39;t work you&#39;d think they&#39;d have just turned it off or you&#39;d think they just wouldn&#39;t have developed it in the first place but that&#39;s not actually what&#39;s interesting what&#39;s interesting is the icon that icon is to my eyes just an inverted version of the windows true type font icon I mean it&#39;s not quite right like if you invert that you get a different set of colors entirely but I&#39;m pretty sure that somebody just reached into the windows folder and pulled out that icon cuz they wanted something that vaguely represented text uh and then did something to it like ran the Photoshop find edges filter or whatever and then you know shoved it into the firmware and this is not shocking in itself I have seen this done many times with super cheap electronics they&#39;ll just rip off images usually from Windows XP this is actually surprisingly outdated so there would be nothing remarkable about this at all except that we&#39;ve seen it before in the video I mentioned earlier quick start guide end episode 2 when I was showing off the aitech laptop that had the built-in DVD player chip somebody pointed out in the comments that if you look in the OSD sure enough there&#39;s a ripped Windows 95 true type font icon now it wouldn&#39;t be shocking at all to learn that this had counterfeit Electronics in it uh made by somebody who doesn&#39;t care about ripping off files straight out of Windows but for both devices to have ripped off the exact same icon instead of going with like the text file icon which you&#39;d think would be more recognizable than the technical incorrect font one that feels too coincidental right and it makes you wonder in the aitech video I talked about how the chip that was in that laptop was literally meant to go in devices like this and its function was to be the cheapest possible way to bring a device like this into existence it&#39;s just a fully integrated chip that does absolutely everything you need talks to the drive talks to the screen talks to your audio Hardware everything so wouldn&#39;t it be funny if you you know a day after publishing that video I walked into a store and found another device that used the exact same chip well I took a look in there to find out if that were the case and minor spoiler it&#39;s not but it also kind of sort of is so I&#39;m going to take this apart again on camera show you what&#39;s in there and then I&#39;ll tell you the punch line this thing comes apart super easy just spin out all the screws now unsurprisingly this is the kind of device where uh if you separate the two halves without thinking too hard uh you can completely destroy it so let&#39;s make sure there&#39;s no disc in there okay good and then if you just try and pop the bottom off you&#39;ll tear all the cables AP so you have to carefully lift the top up here oh already broke something and then flip that over like that and disconnect that lead and now we can lay it down what was this this was the IR window up here actually not entirely sure what was holding that in oh I see there&#39;s three little Stakes there and they match up with the little tiny holes in the plastic here wow those did not do a very good job oh got it terrific so this is built pretty much exactly like you&#39;d expect uh the bottom is an absolute featherweight it&#39;s clearly mostly air all the actual mass of this thing is just in that LCD panel surprising nobody flying leads everywhere almost no cable management stuff just taped down and if you were to gently pull on any of these you&#39;d just rip a connector right off the board I&#39;m sure but hey you&#39;re not supposed to take it apart the cdrom mechanism here obviously bought from somebody else sits on these little silicone supports here so it&#39;s not actually held in by anything I mean they probably could have put a screw through one or three of these but that would have cost money so they didn&#39;t there&#39;s just a matching plastic pegs on the top here uh which means as you&#39;re taking it apart this whole mechanism can just fall out terrific I&#39;m also a really big fan of what they did with the LEDs this is a level of cost cutting that&#39;s kind of new to me they&#39;ve just left the legs on these LEDs untrimmed uh and then just bent them down at the end slded them into the board and then slid heat shrink over them so the leads don&#39;t Bridge together when the thing vibrates and that&#39;s it there&#39;s there&#39;s no like matching hole in the casting that the other end of the LED slots into they just sort of um they just sort of lay here and that&#39;s it the best thing they did was you know bend the IR receiver up a little bit so we can see through the window uh but what I find really entertaining here is instead of casting some kind of Boss into the bottom shell to hold these at the right level which to be clear is essentially free they&#39;re already making the rest of the plastic casting right so what would it have cost them to have a couple little little bosses like this just to hold those up they&#39;ve instead just used a a like a sticky back piece of foam to hold them at the right level and that&#39;s good enough the window in the front isn&#39;t even labeled so I guess it doesn&#39;t really matter where they are left to right and this saved you know 3 or 4 seconds of assembly time so that&#39;s good enough and hey you know at least they bothered to Like Glue in the terrible speakers and I don&#39;t know why this is exactly but they&#39;ve actually silk screened these pcbs indicating where you&#39;re supposed to put the screws I guess it&#39;s kind of a weird depiction of a screw if so but Sony does this they indicate uh every single screw on the chassis of their device that you need to take out to get the thing open uh which is Handy for taking it apart I&#39;m not really sure what this is supposed to indicate I guess it&#39;s for the assembly person to tell them not to put a screw there I suppose and they&#39;ve actually bothered to label the pins on the connectors so yeah a little more effort than you&#39;d necessarily expect for something this cheap and one other thing they didn&#39;t strictly speaking need to do is they actually put some fish paper over the battery which you know lithiumion batteries are little hand grenades that we put in our pockets and carry around with us so you it doesn&#39;t make it incredibly safe but it&#39;s a little safer than it absolutely needed to be especially cuz there&#39;s a decent amount of power down there I I don&#39;t want to try and get this off cuz I started trying to peel it it just starts falling apart and I don&#39;t think these are going to be labeled and if they are they won&#39;t be labeled honestly so I don&#39;t know what the capacity of these battery packs is but they&#39;re about yay big and there&#39;s two of them there&#39;s at least twice as much volume to those packs as there is in like a typical smartphone battery and if those are like what 6 to 8 Amp hours then there&#39;s probably 10 to 15 amp hours here if these are at all reasonable battery packs and given that your typical like DVD player s so pulls like a watt other than the backlight and the motor in the drive there&#39;s not a lot of power consumption in here so it&#39;s very possible this thing would run for just hours and hours and hours on a charge now to that end I have no idea if that&#39;s true because there&#39;s no indication in the on-screen display of the battery charge status of this device you&#39;d think that it would show a battery icon on the menu or it would show you when it&#39;s charging uh it doesn&#39;t and I have not managed to run down the battery in this thing yet so I don&#39;t know what happens when it runs out of juice but my guess is it just turns off and I&#39;m guessing that because I don&#39;t think they went with a DVD player chip that knows that it&#39;s in a portable device like I said earlier this is not using an ESS video drive it has a mediatech Mt 1389 vdu a completely different chip from a completely different company at least in theory but we&#39;ll come back to that it is at least the same kind of thing it&#39;s a single chip DVD player solution does you know decoding and displaying all these different formats and handles audio and the whole nine yards all you have to do is give it a couple support chips and Bam you got yourself a DVD player now I don&#39;t know what the vdu suffix means I looked this up and there were a whole bunch of variants among them a portable version the Mt 1389 P so presumably that would have like the battery charge level meter that I was talking about but for all I know the vdu rolls all those variants into one that&#39;s not uncommon so maybe this supports it they just didn&#39;t bother turning it on what I can tell you is that this chip is potentially very very old the Mt 1389 data sheet is stamped 2006 and while I don&#39;t know if this one&#39;s newer than that honestly I&#39;d be surprised if anybody was really working on DVD player chips after that point in time because Blu-ray had just come out and while that didn&#39;t immediately halt all sales of DVD players I mean duh I figured that most R&amp;D work probably pivoted to the new technology because if somebody was expecting new features they wouldn&#39;t be buying a DVD player right right at least that&#39;s how I think the manufacturers would have seen it so this chip is potentially 18 years old and I wouldn&#39;t be surprised to learn that it was literally sitting in a drum of chips in like the shenzen electronics mall for pretty much that whole time either that or it&#39;s just been in continuous production for nearly 20 years neither one would surprise me too much so this chip is probably very old and that would explain why this thing is so dog slow it does have a CPU in there and I don&#39;t have any specs on it the data sheet doesn&#39;t talk about it really at all other than to suggest that it&#39;s 32-bit risk so it&#39;s probably an arm core from 2006 that was you know a few pennies at the time to manufacture I&#39;m going to guess that it&#39;s like 150 mahz something like that not very impressive by the standards of any time so that&#39;s obviously why the menus and image loading and whatnot is so dog slow the only part of this that&#39;s efficient is the stuff that&#39;s being offloaded to the dedicated decoding course the D Sheet&#39;s very proud of its MPEG 4 capabilities and its USB 2.0 capabilities and the other state-of-the-art Technologies but I don&#39;t think they had a dedicated jpeg core on there but how about that NES mode I mean that was super slow too but could it really be running on the mediatech chip like on the DVD decoder well I don&#39;t really have any other explanation cuz there&#39;s nowhere else it could really live like there&#39;s certainly a lot of devices made over the last couple decades that have had an NES clone chip also called a famic clone tucked into a corner somewhere and theoretically they could have put one of those on here and then when you load a ROM it just like switches the video input over to that or whatever but well they didn&#39;t I mean you can tell they didn&#39;t because it runs like crap right if it was a f clone it would not necessarily be a perfect simulation of an NES but it would at least run at the right speed this is clearly running on a processor somewhere and the only one I can find is in the mediate Tech I&#39;ve identified pretty much all the chips on here this guy is an audio amplifier uh this is a bunch of power circuitry including the battery charge controller right there uh down here you&#39;ve got an lvds driver that&#39;s for controlling the LCD this guy I can&#39;t identify without peeling off the sticker and I was messing it up trying to do that but I&#39;m pretty positive from the outline and the position that it&#39;s SD ram because the mediatech chip requires RAM and there&#39;s no other chips on here they could be doing that uh then this is kind of interesting I don&#39;t know about any of this stuff but I was kind of surprised to find that this is a motor spindle controller for the DVD ROM mechanism I had assumed it would all be integrated into one package you know you would just give it like power and serial control signals and it would spit out data but apparently no I I guess a couple of these wires down here must go to the motor spindle and then it gets controlled by a chip the vendor provides that&#39;s probably normal but it just seemed weird to me uh and then there&#39;s a nor flash chip over here that&#39;s presumably where the firmware for the mediatech lives and that&#39;s it that&#39;s that&#39;s everything uh the whole device is just those chips there&#39;s nothing else on here with a processor I&#39;m going to flip this over and show you the back side of the board just to to be clear there&#39;s nothing back here other than traces and test points and actually a whole bunch of labels again this is labeled much better than I expected uh everything here uh from the DC input the LCD um I think backlight output uh the composite input and output and then a whole bunch of signals for I think the the DVD ROM as well as the LED pins everything is labeled and presumably the test points are for automated testing but the labels must be for human eyes right so this was actually designed with the notion that a person might actually sit down and try and troubleshoot it and that&#39;s kind of wild to me you&#39;d think this kind of board is being churned out by the millions specifically for for this kind of device and thus you know the expectation is they&#39;re going to test one during manufacturing if it doesn&#39;t work they&#39;re just going to throw it away right who&#39;s going to bother to come back with an oscilloscope or a multimeter and and poke at things right like by the time you&#39;ve had a human being lay a hand on this thing you&#39;ve already lost money on it right so I have to assume that whoever designed this board was actually trying to do you know a good job which is kind of shocking with this sort of uh hyper cheap electronics but to go back to the NES for a moment I&#39;m kind of curious how that emulator got in there as it were there&#39;s no information in the data sheet for the Mt 1389 about programming it yourself about providing your own software it barely even mentions that there&#39;s a c U there&#39;s there&#39;s no description of its capabilities you know bus width nothing so it it kind of feels like maybe these things just came with firmware and you just used it so maybe mediatech actually built in that NES feature themselves I don&#39;t know but let&#39;s talk about mediatech and firmware for a moment going back to the mystery of the true type font icon is there a connection between ESS and mediatech yes and a really weird one because in 2003 ESS sued them for stealing apparently their firmware it&#39;s not clear to me whether it&#39;s just like the UI or if it was actually the whole firmware but I suspect it was because uh they actually succeeded they settled they got $45 million from mediatech and in return they granted them a license to continue using their firmware on their devices so it seems to follow then that the mediatech chips at least at some point must have been clones of the video drive because they were using the video Drive firmware and that makes me wonder if ESS stole the true type font icon to begin with and then mediatech stole it from them I mean it&#39;s entirely possible that neither company was responsible mediatech may not have developed the final UI for this thing maybe whoever assembled this board customized the firmware and that&#39;s when they injected it and maybe the same thing happened uh with whoever MSI bought the firmware from uh for the ACH laptop cuz I&#39;m sure they didn&#39;t develop it themselves this could still be a total coincidence virtually everybody has that file lurking on their computer and it&#39;s so easy to just grab that instead of finding a source for legal stock imagery but it was still amusing to find out that this connection existed I mean not as amusing as the name of the final product but what can you do so that&#39;s the end of the video and I&#39;m really glad because this was such a SLO to put together I was not planning on there being any real narrative to this I just I thought the name of the thing was funny and the video put was neat and I had a couple jokes about like the weird firmware and that was it and then like a few minutes before I started shooting I found out about the stolen firmware business and I&#39;m like well I got to work that in and then over the course of shooting and editing I just kept learning new things about it and having to go back and shoot new sequences to insert uh and the result to me just feels like this bizarre Patchwork quilt of disjointed clips and I hope it doesn&#39;t feel that way to you but uh hopefully you enjoyed yourself and if you did uh it&#39;d be cool if you could subscribe uh to let me know I didn&#39;t didn&#39;t screw up too bad uh but if you really want to help me out then consider supporting me on patreon like these people are doing because without them I couldn&#39;t do any of this I mean this is my full-time job so I couldn&#39;t like you know buy groceries or put gas in my car or anything uh but in addition I wouldn&#39;t be able to buy you know weird stuff like this this was like 50 bucks and I had no idea if there was going to be anything to it uh but fortunately uh my supporters have put their faith in me to just buy things and find out if there&#39;s something to say about them and it works out far more often than I would expect so I want to thank all my patrons for believing in me I&#39;m incredibly grateful and everyone else thanks for watching

Transcript for:Lecture on a Portable DVD Player named Boy Fun

Transcript for:
Lecture on a Portable DVD Player named Boy Fun