New Toshiba HD-DVD player is really a Pentium 4 PC
Toshiba has fired a shot in the war between formats to have high definition on a disc. Their HD-A1 player hit the shelves earlier this week, and has been met with fairly good reviews overall. Being interested in the format, I decided to hunt around and find an available player to go and check out. After bringing one back to the office, I took a little look under the hood to see what goes into a high definition DVD player. I had heard it was really a standard PC in there, with an IDE drive playing back content. Sure enough, after poking around that's exactly what I found. There is a USB flash disk inside the unit that holds the bootable firmware that runs the player, and it will be very interesting in the near future to see what secrets it holds.
