Toshiba's new HD DVD Player uses Red Hat Linux

Upon hearing rumors that Toshiba put a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4 CPU and a gig of PC2700 DDR RAM in their new $500 high definition set-top DVD player, I was intrigued.  When I heard that they also put in a standard desktop HD-DVD reader, I had to buy one and see if these wild accusations were true.  So I called around and found that just about the last one available in Phoenix was to be had at a Best Buy on the edge of town.  $560 later it was mine, and on its way to the surgery table for close inspection.

I quickly cracked open the box and without even taking time to plug it into a high def set conveniently located only 20 feet away, started taking it apart to see what was under the hood.  Soon a friend of mine, Scott Cate, came over, screwdriver in-hand, to help out.  We found out that sure enough, all the rumors were true.

The HD-DVD drive we pulled out of the thing has a standard 40-pin IDE interface, and when connected to an XP machine identifies itself as “_NEC HDDVD HR1100A“, which is a recently-released HD-DVD reader that also reads normal DVDs and CDs.

When I put a HD-DVD movie in to try to see what's on the disc it just says “D:\ is not accessible.  Incorrect function.“.  Even under Vista Beta 1 same story.  Perhaps a later beta will have a driver and allow us to see what's on these HD-DVD discs.  Is it still VOB-ified or now something different under the new AACS copy protection?  Or perhaps the new protection restricts you from even reading any data at all!  Wouldn't that be a kicker.

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