Cheap, Silly, Remarkably Useful DVD Player

[@YourWishes]

Babe! grab the the official Gravis 34oz Water/Liquid Jug and the Gravis Microwave Pizza Rolls ( 24-Pack ) and Gravis Diet Cola 2-Litre Hydration Drink Soda / Soft Drink 70oz Sugar-Free. I'll grab the Replacement Remote Control Only for Roku TV, Compatible for TCL Roku (Not for Stick and Box) and load up his new video!

[@CathodeRayDude]

this is one of the funniest comments I've ever received

[@Toonrick12]

Spoken like a true Amazon page.

[@LKComputes]

@@CathodeRayDude you should 100% make the official gravis 34oz water/liquid jug

[@HotClown]

IT IS TIME TIME FOR BOIFUN

[@S15Fox]

I'm afraid I don't have Gravis jug, Gravis pizza or Gravis soda. I only got Gravis Ultrasound MAX 2.1, would that do?

[@krank23]

"Set it to 'wide', which makes it tall…" Spot on dry delivery, man.

[@Ryuujin1024]

10:13 "While doing something with your other hand" And thats why they called it Boifun

[@JonneBackhaus]

The marketing possibilities are endless: "The whole family can enjoy the 15 inch boifun"

[@RichardFraser-y9t]

That would be uncomfortable to put away.

[@Gatorade69]

15inches ? I don't think the whole family can enjoy that. Maybe mom.

[@CamelCasee]

@@Gatorade69And Grandma

[@RocketboyX]

How to get on a list just for buying a dvd player.

[@user-sc5gs3ly8d]

15 inches of boyfun. Wow.

[@vwestlife]

I did a video all about the incompatibility of those dreaded 3.5mm A/V cables. The stereo TRRS version had at least four different pinouts in use.

[@CathodeRayDude]

Okay it turns out this thing DOES have a JPEG decoder core. It wasn't in the first block diagram or feature list in the datasheet but was in another diagram much further down. So apparently it just... sucks? Also I'm realizing that I made a bit of a "video producer brain" mistake - when I'm flipping through images, I cut out all the loading after the first one because, like, I didn't want to make you all sit there for 40 seconds while I went through just a couple pictures, and I just thought "well everyone will see the cuts and realize that I've skipped some time", but looking back I realize you'd really have to be paying close attention to notice that, whoops. So yeah, each JPEG, other than that super low res one at the beginning, took over 10 seconds to appear.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Honestly the load speed seemed similar regardless of resolution… maybe JPEG is fast (I’d assume without checking it’d have Motion JPEG for Video CD) but the rescaling is CPU bound. If so that’s hilariously sad.

[@CathodeRayDude]

@@kaitlyn__L oh sorry that was movie magic, I cut out some footage. the old low res digital camera photo loads in half a second, larger files take 10+. I haven't clocked it but I'm pretty sure it varies by file size proportionally

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@CathodeRayDude that totally tracks! Thanks :) (though does make me think 320x240 might’ve loaded fast enough for awful early 15fps video 🤔)

[@DEMENTO01]

probably has a jpeg decoder designed in the 90s they licensed for like 5 cents lol

[@lifewhydoyoumockme]

It's probably the case that the bottleneck isn't the decoder, but the pathetic amount of working RAM supplied. While a compressed file may be only a few hundred kilobytes, you still need enough RAM to buffer the entire thing uncompressed otherwise it's going to end up doing a tedious amount of fetching macroblocks, decompressing them to RAM, shuffling those bytes off to the framebuffer, rinsing and repeating. My guess is there's only 4MBs of RAM, so anything much higher than 2MP is a pain to decode.

[@mallardtheduck1]

On the use of Windows icons; most of the icons in Windows/Office/etc. are included in the "Visual Studio Image Library" which is pretty liberally licenced (basically, as long a someone uses Visual Studio for something during development, you're probably ok), so it's not exactly "ripped off", Microsoft actually allows it.

[@kreuner11]

wow, those have everything!!!

[@confusedkemono]

21:14 hey bro here isnt your controller

[@TheSuperLyntendo]

Can confirm that those controllers work much like NES ones, and just have USB as the form factor. Years ago picked one up at a flea market, unaware of what it was. It refused to play ball with my PC. Opened it up, and found it had no microcontroller that I could find, the buttons instead wired directly into the USB plug.

[@CathodeRayDude]

wait wait, were they literally wired directly to the plug? NES pads still have An Chip in them, a shift register if I remember correctly.

[@TheSuperLyntendo]

@@CathodeRayDude As far as I remember, yeah. It's in a box somewhere at my parents' but I'll be there this weekend anyways, so I'll check then, and take some proper pictures then.

[@CathodeRayDude]

@@TheSuperLyntendo if it's not too inconvenient, it would be cool if you could email shots of the internals to me. Cathode ray dude at gmail

[@TheSuperLyntendo]

@@CathodeRayDude Will do! No trouble at all.

[@CathodeRayDude]

@@gluttonousmaximus9048 if there were some diodes in there I think you could achieve it with polarity reversal on the scanning signal but yeah idk

[@xliquidflames]

3:03 Hey, I used to watch an episode of a TV show on my 6th gen iPod Classic during my lunch break at the Cingular store. The screen on those was 2.5 inches and 320x420. The perfect size for a laptop. I also loaned it to a friend who was in the hospital for a week and loaded it up with her favorite movies and TV shows. She used it so much that week, the click wheel stopped working by the last day. So, by those standards and that time period, a portable 4 inch screen that plays DVDs was huge.

[@CathodeRayDude]

hahaha okay that's fair. idk, like, it's easier to picture it as a toss-in feature on a device purchased for other purposes ; the idea of spending several hundred bucks on something whose sole purpose is to play video on a tiny screen seems more absurd than it probably should.

[@xliquidflames]

​@@CathodeRayDudeOh, yeah, you're right. I see what you mean. The iPod wasn't designed just for video. I see your point.

[@xliquidflames]

Oh... 12:29 mentions the video iPod. That's another lesson in "finish the video before commenting."

[@volvo09]

A few times I loaded movies / TV shows onto my Zune and I'd watch them at the gym or when on lunch at work... For both devices the process of converting and loading a video wasn't super convenient, so it wasn't exactly popular.

[@renakunisaki]

I'll do you one better: Nintendo DS. 256x192

[@No-mq5lw]

31:44 My grandma bought a brand new DVD player in 2023 replacing her perfectly fine working one because it was on sale. I told her that she might as well thrifted for a Blu ray player, because they also play DVDs, and she didn't know that.

[@c0smoKram3r]

Not too long ago my dad unplugged the BluRay player from the TV and pulled it out from the cabinet and fished out an old DVD player from the cupboard to watch a DVD...

[@scott8919]

This was awesome. The whole beginning and Puredick... 😂

[@Rib_]

The MT1389 is still for sale I believe, it's still listed on MediaTek's site and they are usually pretty good at removing discontinued products. The MT1389 firmware source code for many different chip variants has leaked online, and those leaks do have code related to the NES functionality, so I believe that it came with the firmware, just not advertised on the datasheet for some reason.

[@xmlthegreat]

That reason being Nintendo probably

[@No-mq5lw]

@@gluttonousmaximus9048Only one I found are dead. Or are some site that wants you to sign up/pay.

[@Code7Unltd]

@@xmlthegreat Another point, V.R. Technology and their VTxx systems have made Nintendo clone production trivial.

[@CezaryAkakios]

The datasheet here is most likely just a marketing summary. In reality you would probably contract with MediaTek and sign an NDA, and they would provide a full toolchain and documentation for customization and integration, and that's where the capabilities of the internal cores would likely be evident.

[@CathodeRayDude]

I figure that's probably true, but doesn't it seem odd to leave out an entire massive feature like arbitrary programmability? I'm not expecting deep details, but you'd think it would at least mention that custom firmware was *possible.*

[@0xbenedikt]

@@CathodeRayDudeDump the flash chip and see what the community makes of it ;)

[@RatcheT2497]

a datasheet for the MT1389L i found mentions an embedded 8032 microcontroller with 1024 bytes of builtin ram and support for a 2mb flash interface. maybe this is for programming different menu screens? and maybe for this specific player they decided fuck it and embedded a whole nes emulator straight into the menu firmware? yowza... i wonder how accurate it is

[@thisisbhm]

Which explains silkscreening and markings. It's a debugging feature for pre-production, I guess.

[@DBurg.]

This pen drive has Quake, Unreal Tournament, movies and a furry saying "Trans rights". How many LAN parties have this pen drive been in without getting wiped?

[@juanmacias5922]

From reading the comments i found their name is Xenia, a Linux mascot lol

[@Dragoon91786]

​@@juanmacias5922so, like every party, then? 😅

[@agy234]

Underrated comment

[@RisingRevengeance]

Many years ago I used to dump old cartoons in my language onto youtube, not very legal but hey. Point is I got very familiar with what would get me strikes and Ghibli was the worst offender. I tried everything I could to get around the automated system but even the things that would work for Disney movies had no effect on Ghibli. This was over 10 years ago so I can't even imagine how strict the system is now.

[@rhysbaker2595]

They actually hire a guy to sit in a room watching KZbin videos all day, when he finds one it strikes instantly

[@domramsey]

I think it's useful to understand how these products generally come about. The SOCs are cheap commodity items that cost pennies to make. Some third party then comes along and designs a board around that SOC. It might implement some or all of the chip's features, but the boards themselves are also commodity items. Someone else comes along and designs a consumer product around the board and sticks various brand names on that. So the company that made "Boifun" probably didn't make the board. And you end up with a huge variety of products with very similar features and interfaces. Looking at that device, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the LCD driver doesn't also have the full functionality of a 1990s TV hidden in there too. The screen means you've basically got two commodity devices smashed into one case there.

[@pap3rw8]

This is an important detail. This device is a great example of how commodity electronics get produced. There's little strategy and minimal effort put into the final product. It's just, what components can I source and where can I shave pennies from the design

[@Setsuna_Kyoura]

Yeah, and thats why the boards are labeled so well. These are all separate OEM products combined.

[@tOSdude]

Random feature that may not have been noticed: There are keyhole screw points on the bottom so you can wall mount this thing in tablet mode.

[@kuebby]

You really don't give yourself enough credit, you do a great job with off the cuff jokes. That Puredick sight gag was Simpsons quality.

[@Zaphod0414]

The cohesiveness of your patchwork narrative here is still better than most people's fully scripted stuff, man. You very much have a natural knack for spinning a yarn. That's why I totally enjoy listening to you go off for 45 minutes on a topic that I wouldn't give most other creators more than 10 minutes with.

[@repatch43]

That’s not a slow button scan. Buttons don’t click just once when you press them. If you look with an oscilloscope you’ll see a lot of ‘bouncing’. So denouncing is needed. You can do it in hardware, but cheaper is in software. Basically they wait for a button press, and the. Wait a fixed time to confirm the button was actually pressed. That time is what you have to exceed for the button press to register. Now, cheaper buttons bounce longer, so it’s entirely possible they had to lengthen their denounce time since otherwise it would register as multiple clicks. Great video

[@benespection]

Yeah, the first thing I thought was it's just a crap debounce routine.

[@c.c.a.s5005]

Man,I could honestly watch you talk about anything endlessly.I love ya man

[@BlobVanDam]

The problem with demonstrating the screen is that your white balance would be adjusted to your room lighting, which would be warm, but the color temp of the screen is ideally 6500K or in practice probably way bluer than that, especially if it's LED backlit, because they never calibrate them to offset the overwhelming blue.

[@DaiAtlus79]

Boifun sounds like a Grindr competitor

[@fluffycritter]

I wonder if the difference in how the screen looks on camera vs. in real life is due to the display’s polarization interacting with the camera sensor. Also, no, DVDs do not actually declare their encoded aspect ratio. That feature didn’t appear until Blu-Ray. Back when DVD was specified the assumption was that everything would still be 4:3, and “anamorphic 16:9” was basically a retrofit. (BTW the Divx logo you showed was for the Divx rental format and not the DivX CODEC, which was also a huge source of confusion back then)

[@JORGETECHJorge]

I think he showed the correct logo for the Divx codec, I still remember seeing the watermark on old videos.

[@Toonrick12]

Wasn't that the format that made DVDs timed rentals and refused to play until it called home to Circuit City or something? Ironic how that was the part that was too futuristic for the 2000s.

[@Dwarg91]

@@Toonrick12That’s the Divix I remember.

[@CuriouserArchive]

Um... that's not true. DVD videos do have a flag for the aspect ratio, and 16:9 anamorphic DVDs were available from the get go in 1996 in Japan. Reviews for US releases in 1997 can be found that mention it too. The video on DVDs is actually always anamorphic so it's important for the player to know the aspect ratio of both the display and the video so it can be formatted properly.

[@aprofondir]

At least in Europe, they absolutely did declare their aspect ratio

[@syntaxvrc]

not gonna lie, I kinda love when things go off the rails like they did here. and yet you still managed to tie everything together into a cohesive narrative! another banger as always!

[@MichiganPeatMoss]

Yes, Aging Wheels has referenced the made-up brand names, but sludge describes it a bit further. :)

[@tituslafrombois1164]

Perhaps not a physical release of your videos on disc, but... ISO? Like, it would be *absurdly* nerdy in an appropriate sort of way to be like "if you join my patron you get access to all my videos in downloadable ISO format for burning onto dual layer DVD-R's and BD-R's" though the effort needed would be quite high

[@Kumimono]

Perfect for VHS transfer!

[@Kalvinjj]

@@Kumimono D-VHS or nothing!

[@harisalic2568]

​@@gluttonousmaximus9048now I'm tempted to look for my Adobe CS5 discs and make a DVD menu using Encore

[@nooneinpart]

As long as it has proper interlacing to maintain that smooth 60fps that is basically a signature trademark of this channel

[@tituslafrombois1164]

@@nooneinpart Peak nerdosity, since both DVD and Blu-ray do support 60i 😂

[@shiz_txt]

Regarding that MediaTek chip's CPU architecture: in certain areas, MediaTek is sort of infamous for rolling a ton of chips with different custom instruction sets tuned for the purpose (presumably generated in some sense). Considering the era and application, I wouldn't rule out that this chip runs a custom-but-uninteresting generic 32-bit RISC instruction set. Would perhaps also explain why the NES core is so slow, as it wouldn't benefit much from architecture-specific optimizations. Also, that unknown chip looks like a type II TSOP package, which gives it a high probability of being DRAM indeed. Makes sense since that's definitely not in the chip itself. Isn't there some silkscreen marking right below it that could give a clue?

[@Rib_]

It's an 8051.

[@shiz_txt]

@@Rib_An 8051 is hardly the "32-bit RISC microcontroller" they claim it to be, would be very interested where you got that information from!

[@indask8]

From what I read on the internet, MT1389 has a built in ARM7 chip (100Mhz ???). Cannot find any confirmation. Theorically it should be capable of emulating Nes fine (GBA can with an ARM7 16Mhz), but I guess they just tossed in an early emulator and called it a day.

[@Gatorade69]

My uncle has this exact same DVD player (though branded as something different), I couldn't get it to run NES roms though.

[@DaiAtlus79]

@@indask8 yeah that emulator maybe 'compatible' ie ARM7 but maybe frequency dependent for operation, so it runs slowly at the first sign of resistance because it cant throw more power at it, maybe? and agreed, a less powerful chip can run all of those so Lord Gaben knows whats going on under the hood for it as it maybe so barebones it may not have anything to help dynamic things like increasing processing power dedicated to it, or memory management.

[@blazehenot2536]

Hot DAMN, you’re really cranking these out. I always love seeing a new video from you. keep up the good work but also don’t forget to rest.

[@FliesLikeABrick]

The test ports on the board -- I think you touched on the reality earlier in the video, when someone recognized that order of ports from a bunch of these devices. Someone (organization) at some point must have designed this board with the intent of selling them to tons of product integrators like whoever made this 6-letter product. Because the board designer in turn would then need to support their customers (the people making/integrating the products), it makes sense that they would want test points designed in because they would want to reproduce and investigate any weird symptoms that the integrators run into when designing/QAing their own derivative product. That's my theory at least. Also this theory potentially unifies the silkscreened screw logos on the board that seem odd in the context of this rock-bottom product -- those input/control modules are most likely procured from a different OEM, then integrated with this product at the time of its own engineering. Again.. just a theory, but it would unify/explain why there are 2-3 different styles of PCB and component/design approach in the one product, the producers of this device were just lego-kitting it together, with most of their engineering probably being in the design of the clamshell and related engineering for assembly

[@coyote_den]

The NES emulator is without a doubt on that little serial flash along with the BOIFUN logos and such. Those MediaTek chips have built in firmware, and are customizable to a degree. NES emulation is not a standard feature of the chip, so someone added it.... then someone else took that flash image (maybe even copied it from a different OEM) and customized it for this particular brand, etc...

[@Bc232klm]

Portable DVD players with av in were the ultimate portable monitors for consoles back in the day.

[@DaiAtlus79]

i lucked out a couple of years ago, as a local thrift store had a DVD player monitor for sale with no plugs etc but i was able to sort out a wall wort to hook up (takes 9-12v) and has AV in besides its own proprietary input (looked to be from a kit where it had a main player and screen and then this one was to connect up for kid#2 sitting in the back seat so they could both watch Spongebob or whatever). i added mounts for a tablet wire stand and now its a production monitor that i use with a video camera i have that has SVideo out, then the cable i use converts it to Composite (its so i can frame the shot properly when i cant see the viewfinder).

[@EilonwyWanderer]

The menu items for pan/scan and letterbox -- those are for 4:3 displays, to decide how a 16:9 movie shows up.

[@CathodeRayDude]

yeah, i just don't get why they don't do anything. it seems to be simulating a 4:3 display, but it doesn't crop the 16:9 content. it makes me wonder if it's misconfigured. or maybe it only applies to the composite output, I didn't try that.

[@Shotblur]

It doesn't crop, it's for anamorphic DVDs that smush the widescreen video down into 4:3 for later expansion by a widescreen compatible player ​@@CathodeRayDude

[@njm1971nyc]

​@@Shotblur not quite. The anamorphic video exits the DVD player "untouched". The TV screen shape is what stretches it out to the right shape. The DVD player DOES squish anamorphic video vertically (to create letterboxed 16:9) if you tell the DVD player that your TV is 4:3. If you select Pan/Scan but the video is flagged for Letterbox only, you'll only get letterbox. (And vice versa).

[@njm1971nyc]

​@@Shotblurapologies - I misread your comment. The 16:9 is indeed squeezed into 4:3 during production. 🙂

[@DaiAtlus79]

@@CathodeRayDude probably only 'works' on the AV output and may not actually function over the LCD display driver, as the AV output is probably 4:3 480i only. This thing wouldnt be the worst thing for someone who may need a travel buddy of a movie watcher, like at a family cabin/cottage where power isnt always on or even someone who would hook up an older Famiclone or retro games console to it (did this once with a similar rig a roommate had to play gamecube while the rest of the roommates were using the tv to watch a shitty movie).

[@elbiggus]

My guess about the weird colours on the TT icon is that it's just a difference in the palette used in the UI on the different devices; the binary data in the icon is probably the same, but the BOIFUN just maps them to the wrong colours.

[@CathodeRayDude]

oh man that's a really good point I hadn't considered

[@XanthinZarda]

Oh, yeah. RGB vs YCBCR.

[@nickwallette6201]

The original file would be an ICO. They are normal bitmaps with a special header, so they can (and back in ‘95, usually were) 16/256-color palettized images. So yep, they just aren’t using the right palette. BMP format doesn’t support YUV, and when graphics are converted without color space conversion, you end up with lots of green or magenta.

[@polybiusrom]

boifun is quite possibly one of the best names ive seen from these things by far

[@kevinh96]

The DVD spec does indeed allow for auto switching of aspect ratios, at least in Europe where it sends a signal via the scart output on pin 8 I believe. However most home DVD recorders don't seem to bother recording the aspect ratio switching signal when recording, so on playback you have to set the ratio manually as you had to. Some Pioneer and Sony models would record the aspect ratio switching signal if recording from their internal tuners but most didn't instead relying on you to manually set things up.

[@AgentAsteriski]

My favorite six-letter I owned was "Assletes" on an HDMI capture card. Surprisingly accurate for a gaming peripheral lmao

[@komidanohitouko]

i was about to say “That’s 8 letters!” but then i got the joke 😂😂

[@Hugobros3]

The _original_ 2004 Nintendo DS equipped with an ARM9 core at 66 Mhz can emulate NES games full-speed (and I don't think it can really leverage its own 2D hardware acceleration to do that?). Whatever is in that Mediatek SoC is not just regular garbage, it's advanced garbage.

[@3butalcomp3]

😂 "Advanced Garbage"... Remember the good 'ol day's when shit was made right? Still, it's fun to see how crappy the stuff really is!

[@nytpu]

The Game Boy Advance with an ARM7TDMI running at 16.78 MHz (c. 1996) can emulate NES games at full-speed fairly passably (the only issue being the GBA display is lower resolution than NTSC video), so it's really shocking the DVD player can't even manage lol

[@Dumb_Killjoy]

We're watching the evolution of garbage in real time. I reckon in 50 years we'll have cheapo Android handsets with the power of a 3090.

[@grafxgear]

Man I loved watching connections. There was another show called "The Secret Life of Machines." I would watch that all the time. Tim Hunkin had been restoring TSLOM and putting the videos on KZbin. It's a great watch if you enjoy connections.

[@greggv8]

Someone had a good set of PAL recordings but unfortunately the episode "The Car" still has a ton of problems. It also does on the NTSC and PAL DVD releases, but far worse. The other online releases also have the same issues. If the PAL source for the remastered KZbin release was recorded off broadcast then apparently the master tape for that episode was damaged. I'm pretty certain that when I saw the series during its original run in the USA that "The Car" episode didn't have the glitches. If anyone has a first run off-air, cable, or satellite home recording of "The Car", that doesn't have the synch and field order glitches, I bet Tim Hunkin would be very interested in getting it, especially if it's PAL format. Even a good NTSC recording could be used by cutting the bits that are glitchy in the PAL source then doing some fancy upscaling and frames per second changing to patch over the glitchy bits.

[@danielktdoranie]

So you’re saying BOIFUN is 15 inches? You’re damn right

[@Bkoded]

i really didnt expect so much lore this is crazy

[@jimcooper2423]

Loved "Connections", thank you, James Burke, and "Ray"!

[@belg4mit]

There's a new/fourth season on Curiosity Stream.

[@grayphox]

I always enjoy the well executed humor on this channel.

[@Draknem]

That port is actually for an NES controller, it uses 4 pins and port's metal case as separate contacts to get 5 wires. I have a NES on a chip from aliexpress that uses a controller like that.

[@garretthaney9134]

I LOVED my tiny portable DVD player. Worked in a school computer lab at a commuter campus Saturday and Sunday mornings, and graveyard shifts on weekdays. I just needed to be physically present... between it and a humorously tiny portable B&W TV it got me through many lonely mornings and nights.

[@njm1971nyc]

The aspect ratio/screen type settings are totally normal (for a separate DVD player/TV setup) but rather unusual for an all-in-one device. I kinda like the flexibility though! Since it does more than just DVD playback, it does kinda need this flexibility. As for DVDs being "hard coded with the aspect ratio", yes, they are. Widescreen (true widescreen, not Letterbox) DVDs are anamorphic, and the DVD player has the ability to letterbox or crop (Pan/Scan) to fit the 16:9 video onto 4:3 screens. The Pan/Scan flag is very rarely used (aside from Legal Warnings, disclaimers, menus, etc.) Typically these are flagged P/S to give a full 4:3 image on a 4:3 screen, rather than LBX. The graphics for these are created with excess real estate at the sides (text all within central portion of screen). 99.9999 of video content is flagged to display as LBX on 4:3 screens. To save money on early DVD players, only one scaling chip was designed into the specs. Scaling of overlays (menu highlights and subtitles) is not possible in any DVD player. For menu highlights to appear correct in both 16:9 and 4:3, two separate button highlights have to be created for every menu page. Super annoying. For subtitles, 99% of DVDs share the same stream across both aspect ratios, with the result that they look a bit stretched or squashed, depending what mode you're viewing in. Japanese subtitles were typically the only language where a separate 4:3 and 16:9 stream were supplied by the subtitle vendor. The Japanese are very picky about the characters being displayed in the right shape. Other countries have to suck it up! In my experience, almost every subtitle vendor I ever dealt with (in 20-odd years of DVD authoring) was CLUELESS about the technical aspects of subtitles and had absolutely no comprehension of dedicated 16:9 and LBX subtitle streams. Only those making the Japanese subs understood how to do it 😭 Because of the way menu highlights and subtitles work, it's not possible to just batch process subtitles in Photoshop to resize them. You could, but they'd look horrible. Resizing has to be done in grayscale mode, and only after that can you remap the 255 levels of black-to-white as three pure colors (typically white background with black, red, and blue used for text body, outline, and a very crude dither). Each of these colors get re-mapped as a specific display color and opacity percentage by the DVD player. Wow, that ended up being a very long and nerdy message, but I'm sure some of your viewers will enjoying nerding out reading about obsolete tech 🤷‍♂️ 😂

[@CathodeRayDude]

absolutely fascinating stuff though, thank you for the comment!

[@njm1971nyc]

For clarity, DVD authoring packages for "regular people" and semi-pro people were heavily "abstraction layer" based, and did a ton of the fiddly stuff internally. The pro systems, such as Scenarist, did NOTHING to help the author. Absolutely everything had to be done "by hand".

[@shortcat]

Letterbox and aspect ratio settings of this boi are absurd. I seriously doubt anyone ever watched a movie in proper fullscreen with correct aspect on this thing.

[@soggybaguette8457]

12:10 TRRS cables, as an idea, should be really helpful… but because of a lack of standardization, we end up with irritating things like this. I was just dealing with something like this myself when building a crossover cable that lets me interface my sound card with my phone to send/receive data with minimodem.

[@nickwallette6201]

They actually ARE pretty standard. There are variants, because each is optimized for something different. Is it an audio device with video capability? Then you want tip and ring to be L & R audio, with the third signal, video, being something that you need a special cable to access. This ensures backward compatibility with audio cables and headphones. If you’re making a camcorder, then you can live without stereo audio, as long as you get one audio channel and video. That puts R audio on the optional conductor. “But why the difference between shield and the additional ring?” Well, that depends on the jacks that cable will be used with. Many jacks use a shield contact that is higher up on the plug. Those? You need the second ring to be ground. Other jacks contact the shield at the base of the plug. For those, you want shield to be ground. None of that matters when you’re just using TRS, so decades of COTS jacks never had to care. But with TRRS, it does. See? There’s a reason for all the madness, as long as the manufacturer chose the most applicable wiring for their specific device’s primary function and the ecosystem of things that are usually going to plug into it.

[@greggv8]

It should be possible to make a universal TRRS to RCA cable with a switch for the different arrangements.

[@ZacCrawforth]

Ok, I fucking LOVE that you used Connections as a demo file. That show shaped my adolescence something fierce! All my homies LOVE James Burke!

[@xyonofcalhoun]

It's a Technology Connection!

[@rustkitty]

Of course, the infamous SouljaGame port!!

[@benanderson89]

I think the text reader is probably working correctly but expecting 16-bit character sets to draw chinese charcaters in a different orientation (say, vertical instead of left to right horizontal). It probably gets to the end of the first line, encounters a line-feed or carriage return and proceeds to flip it's shit for the remainder of the file.

[@belg4mit]

It might also expected the display to by in skinny 4:3 mode, etc

[@xmlthegreat]

When you demonstrated the proper way to fold back the screen and hold the thing in the crook of your arm, I felt a terrible buzzing in mind as it filled with giant anime question marks...

[@EduardoBattaglia]

You can always use a Blender Studio movie to test this things, they are free, CC and beatiful

[@moarjank]

Right, or if we're grabbing public domain he can play that now public Disney one with Micky Mouse

[@dancingwiththedogsdj]

The software in that player is also just like what would be in a digital picture frame.... Similar menus and such too.... I think the reason why the pictures are so slow to load is because it was expecting to be more of a slideshow or flipping through images.... And the battery life also designed to be used in a picture frame item... Most of those could play videos just fine if you loaded a few on there. 😊

[@volvo09]

I forgot about those cheap digital picture frames...

[@tuxbunny-foof]

I have an old 2010 RCA DVD player that I'm pretty sure uses basically the same software, just without the USB or NES stuff in it, and I think it's also missing that on screen settings menu. Not sure what files it will play off of DVD, but I know when playing an audio CD it showed almost the same menu as the file browser in the boifun player. When playing DVDs the on screen symbols were also the same, I'm tempted to take mine apart and see what chip it has, and maybe make a DVD with a bunch of files to test with.

[@renakunisaki]

As soon as I saw the Game logo, I knew it would play NES games. Given the awful performance, I actually expected it to be a Famiclone with a DVD player bolted on. But, the games also running terribly disproves that. The games were cut off the same way as the text. Probably an aspect ratio issue? Having once used a PlayStation homebrew app to read a text file off a disc to help repair my PC, I agree that text viewers should be included in everything.

[@domocon44]

*shows me the most interesting thing ever* "But that's not the interesting part!" *shows me something even MORE interesting*

[@henryokeeffe5835]

8:25 If the processor was scanning the buttons that slowly I would expect it to work ~sometimes~ if you pressed it fast. Or if it's multiplexed, to actually activate a different button. I think it's probably just overly-aggressive de-bounce. 22:45 That text editor makes me think you could get it running arbitrary code with a poisoned text file haha. Shame the screen is so shiny. Would otherwise have been nice for a homebrew laptop.

[@stonium69]

The hotwire audio file is someone tricking chat gpt into getting criminal instructions. It was a meme to do that a year ago or so.

[@jadedfoolva3821]

Super awesome meeting you the other day while you were working on this video, it turned out amazing!

[@CathodeRayDude]

Likewise!

[@cromulence]

Re: The VDU suffix on the main chip - perhaps it means it supports a display (i.e VDU) output via LVDS which isn't required in other applications.

[@AB-Prince]

the main issue as to why cameras don't capture some monitors correctly is because the RGB output of a lot of screens are sharp peaks, that your eyes aren't bothered by, but cameras can't really capture the color correctly. similar to how certain things appear to have different colors under incandecent vs flourecent lighting.

[@Gatorade69]

Cameras see the truth. There's a reason the Amish believe that cameras steal souls. My neighbors, they may look human but the camera reveals their true forms. I got the pictures but now the white vans are following me.

[@DurradonXylles]

This device is genuinely kind of amazing for all of the wrong reasons, and has a lot of self-contradictory elements. It's big for a portable DVD player, yet it has a screen to match. It has so many additional features that sound incredibly useful and desirable, especially for its price, but its hardware is too anemic and/or outdated to pull half of them off properly. It's cheap and lightweight, but it clearly has a lot of effort with its construction and even accommodates those who take it apart for repair and troubleshooting. It's too well made and functional to be considered disastrous garbage, but too crappy to be properly useful beyond its its literal product description of a portable DVD player. It's non oui personified as a piece of low end consumer electronics.

[@TommyAgramonSeth]

20:15 I've watched a video recently about a PS5 shaped famiclone that confirms your theory - it's likely not a USB port at all, just a NES controller port that's wired into the same connector. Amazing.

[@BushidoBrownSama]

I believe i saw the same video 😂

[@kagami8779]

I actually did use a portable DVD player as an external monitor for my PowerShot circa 2008! I was doing a lot of long exposures and it helped massively to isolate the tripod/camera and verify it came through much better than the tiny LCD it had.

[@theol1044]

What was the make/model of that player? I was searching through flea markets and yardsales for years (thrift stores almost never carry electronics here, sadly) for such a thing as a portable mini monitor, and there was an abundance of second hand small protable DVD players until some time ago, but never did they have a useable input.

[@kagami8779]

@@theol1044 It was a Polaroid PDM-1058. 3.5mm composite in and out, with a 360 swivel screen too. No idea who really made it, as its from the era where the Polaroid name had been sold for rebranding.

[@SylvesterWolf]

I would suspect that the main PCB and the two button PCB's are part of an off the shelf type kit. They are heavily labelled to let you know where to attach your own cables. You can build it into any shape and size product you like. The screw holes are probably silk screened to show you that you can put a screw there without shorting traces to ground.

[@rustkitty]

1. Buy a BOIFUN brand portable DVD player. 2. Place gay porn DVD in the disc tray. 3. Epoxy the door shut. 4. Why?

[@AB-Prince]

the VDU suffix probably stands for video display unit, perhaps refering to a tv with a built in dvd player.

[@uiopuiop3472]

vdu means virtual skibiddy toilet technologies

[@jddes]

18:16 I appreciate the subliminal dissemination of propaganda for our cause. Seriously though, I love that you tell stories with old tech, an upload is always wonderful Edit: WAIT THAT'S WHAT THE GAME PORT IS FOR!?

[@tyttuut]

When you brought up the D620, I was hoping the D420 would make an appearance. I was not disappointed.

[@gummy0worm]

18:16 i noticed that transfem linux fox :D

[@Ale.K7]

Enjoyed the video! I always remember a Chinese made computer power cable branded "KKCK" I found one time. In Spanish it can be read as "caca seca", dry poop. Unsurprisingly it wasn't good.

[@Dew397]

Wow I never expected a Linux Xenia cameo, super cool!

[@yoyoyonono]

The pinout for the usb port is likely similar to the ones you get on modern famiclones which have USB controllers; that is: 5v, gnd, clock, latch, data, with some pinout which uses the shield as it's own conductor. If you look at what's near that game port on the PCB then you could probably solder on a real nes controller and have that work.

[@shanebaker1]

MY BOY MY BOY MY BOY MY BOY

[@mysticmarble94]

... Fun ?

[@Heizenberg32]

You make this so much more fascinating than the cheap plastic case would imply.

[@SetTopGames]

I see a bunch of these "six letter" devices at my Amazon Return / Dumpster store and my flea market all the time. I actually bought a couple of external DVD drives (with hilarious names like Rieddas) and I've noticed that a lot of them just reuse the same components. My latest purchase - an external USB DVD Drive that's got a Toshiba TS-L633M drive on it - also had an SD card reader AND three extra USB ports. For two bucks. I mean, sure, why not, I can use that on one of my tiny computers or the Pi. How does this device handle interlacing in the video input? I'd grab one of these to use as a secondary monitor for analog video capturing.

[@CathodeRayDude]

It's interesting actually, it handles interlaced video really well. Like, that has to be what's coming out of the camcorder, and it looks terrific on the screen, so it seems to be bob deinterlacing it and producing really clean results

[@bootmii98]

13:25 the little camcorder LCD looks like it has better color rendering than the DVD player from here

[@CathodeRayDude]

it does lol

[@paigelipari6876]

I appreciate Xenia showing up 💕

[@rayproductionsbackupchanne3862]

yasss i love it

[@rdoursenaud]

Apparently you can get the firmware version & de-zone MT1389 devices. FW: - Push "Home Menu" on the remote - Go to "Initial Settings" - Highlight "Options" (Do not enter) - Push "Display" on the remote Zone: - Push "Setup" - Enter "1379"

[@dancingwiththedogsdj]

Man, your videos are really high on my list of "immediate watch" content and I love to avoid reading the title, because I know it's going to be a fun ride and usually on the longer side of things.... I need more! 😁 Your humor usually has me laughing at the most random stuff and that's never a bad thing! Fantastic video as always. Have a wonderful day! 😊🌎❤️🕺🏻🐶💻

[@volvo09]

Seriously, he made an interesting and informative video about a portable DVD player, which I've always viewed exactly as he does.

[@professorbadvibes695]

I love to see weird AliExpress e-waste exploration like this, my mind is racing thinking about what, how, and *why* this thing is. 18:16 XENIA CAMEO!!!

[@NT_x86]

MT1389 32-bit RISC processor is a ARM processor which as far as I can tell is controlled by 8-bit 8051 processor which does the main loop of the firmware, input handling and menu logic (for power saving reasons maybe?) complex operations like drawing the menus it hands over to the ARM processor

[@vwestlife]

"Registered" has a soft G.

[@CathodeRayDude]

It has whatever G I want it to have.

[@vwestlife]

@@CathodeRayDude "Which do you choose, a hard or soft option?"

[@SammyRenard]

I got a soft spot for the latitude D420 and not just because I'm a stoner

[@CathodeRayDude]

same, i keep it around for reasons other than the funny name. I also have it's lower-trim cousin, the X1, which I also love even if it turned out it's a rebadged Samsung.

[@SammyRenard]

@@CathodeRayDudeI also recall running windows 2000 on my d420 at the time but I can't remember if the wifi worked or not

[@SammyRenard]

@@CathodeRayDude Is the X1 the one that had a spiffy second half/docking station that you could also put a second battery in along with a dvd drive?

[@CathodeRayDude]

@@SammyRenard I'm not sure but tbh I doubt it - the d420 had an expansion base that just made the machine thicker and gave you more bays like that, but I think it was a Dell design. The x1 was not originally designed as a business machine, I think, and I can't find a dock like that for it.

[@josephvetter7085]

How are the hinges on the D420? I fell in love with the D410 on the Dell Refurbished site back in the day, gave a ton to friends and family, and then every single one started to have the screen hinges fail.

[@AstralPhnx]

Patreon gang checking in!

[@cleanycloth]

Heyooo!

[@bikeforever2016]

Club 😁

[@3butalcomp3]

​@@cleanycloth...Right back!! I was thinking of "Hey You", by Floyd... & there's your comment. Guess the internet doesn't always suck!! ☮️☮️🍕🍕

[@KrazyKaiser]

Oh, that's why youtube says the video was uploaded 49 seconds ago but there are comments from 2 days ago.

[@LiEnby]

hey wait i know you.

[@joeshabado1431]

"That's the weed number" that made my day!

[@asp-uwu]

Been obsessed with that Xenia trans rights image for the last few days and to see it slowly scan in unexpectedly flashbanged my soul with joy. Great video, thank you for sharing~!

[@XanthinZarda]

Xenia is the Linux mascot we need. Tux is...and perhaps this may be a bit rude, plain and uncanny.

[@xeroniris]

With the button issue, it may not be scanning slowly; it might just be that they were overzealous with their debouncing code. Or maybe the io is particularly noisy, so they needed ridiculous amounts of debouncing.

[@xmlthegreat]

lol that's a sus name

[@tituslafrombois1164]

It's fascinating to imagine, perhaps, some poorly paid employee of some company in China whose job is to develop the cheapest PCB designs possible for things like this - and that either by their own will or perhaps by decree of their manager that even though they're making cheap crap, everything should be properly labeled and silk-screened, just in case. Maybe it's because they were developing the board to sell to other companies - so you need things labeled for the buyer to be able to assemble it properly. I need an hour long documentary about how stuff like this gets made from beginning to end.

[@Ornateluna]

Ayyy trans rights

[@geezheeztall8590]

Your rough work seems significantly more polished than most KZbinrs trying their best. Quick or perfectly edited, your videos are informative, entertaining and interesting. Keep up the great work

[@Cool-Spot]

Trans Rights🏳‍⚧

[@declangallagher1448]

That hinge has a service life in the dozens of openings and closings lol

[@andrewsawesome]

30:33 There is a low battery icon that flashes in the corner of the screen when the battery is about to die.

[@SenorBolsa]

Chinese manufacturers will attempt to recover everything, wages aren't as low as they used to be but labor is still a lot cheaper than it is here in the west and makes a lot of crazy schemes viable, to the point that you can buy motherboards with mobile cpus on them or older chipsets that are no longer in production. I wouldn't be shocked if those mediatek dvd player chips are all recovered from old unsold home DVD players or even recycled/discarded ones if they are no longer in production. Also as you said just surplus and sending people to scout out caches of this stuff could probably support a decade of low volume production.

[@xmlthegreat]

Is there a way to try loading nes roms into the MSI laptop with the ESS chip and seeing if the firmware plays those?

[@CathodeRayDude]

interesting question. based on one of the videos i've seen of these cheap dvd players, at least one version of the mediatek chip can read files off a data CD. it's possible the ESS could too.

[@ttvbrxkens0ul]

Oh my god! I used to have a DVD player with a 'game' port and it came with a cheap usb controller (I did try it on my PC at the time, didn't work at all) and it came with a little mini dvd that had some terrible games on it. It even had an analogue TV tuner that I used on a car journey to watch CBBC (I live in the UK, this was a few years ago). It had the exact same UI as this player as well, except it had the analogue TV tuner as another option

[@Thatwasademo]

"You select wide and that makes it tall" really got me