Update: Have been informed that this was also sold as the MSI M610. I figured there would be an MSI version, so that tracks, although we don't know whether it was the original and this is the rebrand or vice versa. Oversight pointed out by a patron: VLC is certainly decoding the DVD in software, but the original e.g. PowerDVD very possibly interfaced with a hardware codec, most likely in the GPU (such as it is.) I can't find docs on the SiS M741, but a manual for a motherboard with an integrated SiS _chipset_ suggests it had MPEG2 decoding, and frankly it would just be surprising for the era if it didn't. That said, I double checked: I installed a generic copy of PowerDVD and found that it's more efficient than VLC by about 5-6 watts, but still uses software. The CPU was still at 65%, power consumption was 40-45W, and the "use hardware acceleration" checkbox was greyed out. So A) VLC is grossly inefficient (who's surprised) but B) powerdvd doesn't really move the needle that much. Its still possible they had a custom version that DID leverage a hardware codec... but that would barely make a difference, because the idle power consumption (CPU at 0-1%) is 35-38W. I had checked this during scriptwriting, but I should have actually captured the figures and made that point on camera. In any case, it's moot - even if the GPU could decode MPEG2 in only 1-2 watts, the idle power consumption is still twice what the _entire DVD ASIC pulls,_ so this would still struggle to make it through a feature length film. Also, regarding ESS: Their chips were never on sound blasters, but I've thought they were for about _twenty years_ because ESS used nearly identical model numbers to Ensoniq, who _did_ get used on Sound Blasters. ES1868 vs ES1371 - same prefix, similar looking numbers, frequently mentioned in close proximity to each other, but completely unrelated products.
If memory serves this thing software rendered out of the box when playing dvd's in windows. It could not play a feature length dvd on battery when in windows. Honestly you could barely eek out two hours windows battery run time in any use case. It was an awful laptop.
@@RealNovgorod I could be wrong, but I would expect that to be built into the cost of the Videodrive chip. There's something about it in the datasheet, but It could be optional, so, fair point.
25:20 "All the other machines are trash" No. The pheonix hyperspace option of turning system sleep into restless night terrors is wild, genius, terrible, and in a vacuum deserves to exist because somebody put way more engineering prowess into that problem than it deserved.
I recall doing aweful things to my Windows Vista installation to get it to run smoothly, tearing out various services and subsystems based on sketchy guides online. It never did.
@@LordVarkson Windows Vista's biggest problem was that flash memory hadn't proliferated the mainstream yet, mainly because the major computer assemblers saw no benefits. Now that it has, every Windows version after 7 is a slog to use with mechanical hard drives.
@@Code7Unltdhonestly windows 8/8.1 is actually a fair bit faster on a hard drive than 7. But windows 10 post about version 1703 just crawls on a hard drive
When I saw the DVD interface, I recognized it immediately, this interface was very famous in Chinese DVD players, years ago I fixed a DVD with a corrupt firmware, it was an Apex AD1500, when I opened it there was a DVD IDE drive inside. I still have this DVD player, I've already replaced the drive twice with PC parts. I also discovered at the time that there was a community that created modified firmwares for DVD players based on the ESS Videodrive, adding features and removing region locks.
Wow, I need to look into that. You're the second person to mention having an apex player with this exact interface, so it sounds like they were a major user. I may actually have to scrape up an example and see if I can get that special firmware on it
Yep, and I think I had an (unbranded) external hard drive enclosure that could also hook up to a TV to play videos, it had its own remote, and I do remember it both had a big ESS chip and made the same start-up sound, so I think it ran on the same chip! (Edit: I think it was unbranded and called "Portable HDD media player" or something along those lines. It took an IDE hard drive but I think there was also a SATA version, as well as one that took a SATA hard drive and could record composite A/V)
I think I have this model APEX DVD player. It came from the factory with a hidden menu that let you turn off content protection, allowing you to copy a DVD to VHS. If I recall, the menu said something like "you should not be here"
Haha, I imagined those cars for students with two sets of pedals, but in this case they are on right back passenger seat, covered with a carpet and let u “control” car only when it’s off in a parking lot 😄 but you can listen to the music, so…
35:13 I did, but only because LGR did a 'history of eMachines' video and brought it up. I would have had zero idea otherwise. Also, that detachable Kodak VCR that plugs into the camera was an awesome piece of tech. They all should have worked that way.
I used to have that very model. I liked it pretty well, actually. Good keyboard, large size, and while your speakers are blown, the sound was actually excellent. Mine came with a 7200 rpm hard drive. When it got long in the tooth, it handled Linux like a champ. I actually used the DVD player function a lot. I bought it for a deployment overseas in my military days, and so watching movies was one of its main jobs, the other one being a DAW using an interface that lived in the PCI slot. There was never a bootleg DVD made that it couldn't play. It was the ideal cheap deployment laptop in 2005.
I bought two of these off my boss at a local computer builder/repairer after a family traded them in. He only asked for $20 each because he was convinced they were overheating fire hazards and wanted them out of the building. Flipped one to a friend who needed it for college and used the other on and off for years. I never actually used the dvd system much but I do recall that trying to play a 720p MP4 would take 95-100% of the cpu. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
This reminds me of a video I saw the other day about a modern Android tablet/DVD player combo. It's similar in that the DVD player is completely separate from Android, except that the way they connected them together is with an app that requires camera permissions. They connected the DVD player to Android by pretending the video output from the player is a camera. Amazing.
@@THEmuteKi I thought that they had gotten a disc drive working in Android and then implemented a DVD player for Android, that would’ve been neat. I wonder what the chances are that the connection between the player and the tablet is Analog. Reusing the chips from those EasyCap devices.
@@nooneinpartif Samsung made a tablet with dvd player, they would more likely put a DVD-RW Drive in the tablet, and install drivers and MPEG plugins to the Android OS
Same here. Plus a long time ago, i thought it was an european word and pronounced it completely wrong. I'm Lithuanian-German and similar words do exist in european languages and accents. Only found out about it being japanese after someone told me.
I was blown away when you brought out the Kodak MVS! My grandfather worked for Eastman Kodak for decades and he was showing me his MVS over the holidays. He has has tons of tapes but his recorder is broken, and because the MVS records in a slightly different format from other video 8 systems the tapes can't just be ripped with another device. And nobody has the resources to fix them! I'd actually meant to ask if you knew anything about these and if they were worth a video, but here it is!
That's really cool! If you still have those tapes, the vhs-decode project might give you a way to recover the footage with a working Video8 player - they've added support for a lot of formats in the last couple years.
Didn't every cheap laptop sound like that? The speakers aren't blown, they just have no excursion at all, so any sound louder than a gnat farting would cause them to clip.
I really liked this one. Very clever way to bury the lede early on talking about portable DVD players! I always assumed Averatec was an arm or wholly owned subsidiary of Acer, so that too was an interesting revelation. I miss how laptops used to have front panel buttons like that. Back in the day, I had this Toshiba A25 with those front panel buttons that I'd received as a high school graduation gift. I'd put it in my laptop bag with the buttons facing up and the zipper undone and route my headphones through the bag. I'd then set the power options in Windows to never go to sleep and leave Winamp running with my whole music library and proceed to walk to and from work with 2004's chunkiest iPod. No clue how the Pentium 4 in that thing didn't cook itself alive during the process.
That is a horrific hack, but given the era that's a clever one too. If I did that with my laptop with front buttons (Core 2 Duo), it'd probably melt the battery or something tragic.
The answer to the screen part is the MStar MST9131A chip at the bottom left. It's a part with no public documentation, but according to some monitor service manuals, it's a video scaler with VGA+DVI input and LVDS output. The computer side must be connected through DVI, by the SiS 301MV DVI transmitter next to that chip, and the DVD player side through VGA, as those often had.
It might not actually need to use a separate (in this case, analog) video port. Many buses can be tri-stated, i.e. the driving device is put into a high-impedance mode that allows other components to take over the bus. It's often as easy as de-asserting the Chip Select or W and R lines. If that's the case here, then yes, it literally just connects the video card's digital output to the DVD codec's digital output and the LCD's input. In this case, the scaler might be in between the two source and the LCD, if it's being leveraged for scaling low-resolution PC graphics to full screen. Or, it might be chained to the codec, and the PC's graphics card would T up to the scaler and LCD junction point.
That part about combining expensive devices definitely rings true, even into the 2000s as things were starting to get cheaper. I remember my dad specifically buying a laptop that could be used both for work and as a portable DVD player to keep my entertained on long trips, and settling on this one because of this very feature. Like you, though, we had an inverter and I don't remember if I ever actually used it on battery. I seem to remember that ours had a DVD _burner_, and it was also our first DVD burner in the house. I have vague memories of doing some kind of janky network sharing to burn backup DVDs. I hadn't expected to see it in this series, and I've always been curious about how exactly it worked, so I was super excited to see this video. It's wild thinking about how much power this approach saved; I think modern hardware is so efficient that having to spin a DVD drive up versus streaming from disc would kill any savings from such an approach (unless you were trying to software decode AV1 or something, but that's not really comparable).
holy moly. didnt think id see my favorite channel covering something so familiar. my father used to own one of these, in fact its still sitting in the closet in our house. he always told me how great it was for when he was on short flights, being able to bring all of his torrented movies he would burn onto discs and bring with him to watch. i can attest to those remote controls being cheaply made garbage - his only worked for a short while before the battery died, and after he changed it, it just stopped working entirely. i remember being entertained by it on long car rides where dad would pop a movie in and plop it in my lap in the back seat of the car with cars or bugs life or something. as a kid i thought it was the coolest thing. great video!
As an Averatec 3200 owner I can confidently say these machines were an INSANE value at the time. As a poor kid going into college I needed to buy the biggest bang for my buck and was surprised to find this brand. I used it for several years before I sold it for $50 to a friend who used it to play DVDs. BTW, I also had a Soulmate MP3 player. You keep finding these forgotten devices that had a huge impact on my childhood. Thank you for this amazing content!
hahaha holy crap, what are the chances? Yeah, I mean, I'd say the Averatec is *the best portable DVD player I've ever seen.* That screen alone is terrific.
HP continued this trend with their Pavilion and Touchsmart laptops, which would have an IR remote hidden in Expresscard slot (both in 54 mm and 34 mm versions).
Fun fact: ESS still exists today, and shockingly well-regarded, but in the audiophile market. Their Saber DACs are known to be VERY analytical, and they even make high-end headphones.
Absolutely love this series! My mother used to have an Asus Laptop that I am pretty sure had a similar system, but limited to CD playback. Some googling seems to suggest it is called "Asus Audio DJ Stand By Music System" and one model that had it was the "Asus Pro 60".
In the early 2000's you could rent one of those portable DVD players at Amtrak train stations so you wouldn't hurt your neck watching whatever movie they would be showing on the tiny CRTs hanging from the ceiling in the train during the trip. By 2005 I was watching movies on Amtrak with a tiny Creative Zen Vision.
I love this series. Being only slightly older, I remember seeing portable dvd players when their first came out at places like circuit city but interestingly I never knew anyone with one. 2001+ in college we were downloading movies off of Scour, hotline, etc and burning them to CDs. It wasn’t uncommon to have a binder of CDs, usually movies split into two 700 MB files… all before torrents. Thus a pc required for your dorm room movie watching. Good times.
I have nothing interesting to contribute to this conversation. I just wanted to compliment the writing of this video. That description of e-waste was so well written. I especially loved describing AliExpress as a speedrun website. Lol It's funny because it's true and I laugh at things that depress me. Great video.
Man, this IS a really neat idea! Before you even said it I was thinking, this is another perfect dorm room laptop. Imagine a machine like this with a burner drive: Acquire *perfectly legal* MP3s, burn a mix CD, shut down the PC and restart in DVD player mode, and listen! If you added some okay external speakers, it could've worked as a passable stand-in for a compact stereo as well.
Your comment about eMachines all having blown caps had me side eye my fully working eOne sitting on the table next to me. Then you mentioned the eOne was originally not meant to be an eMachines, which probably explains it.
Averatec brings me back to university. Bought one September 2002 for first year. Lasted until 2007. Mine was a laptop first DVD/CD-RW model. That laptop was thinner than this one - slightly thicker than the SVGA port - and relatively light with a decent battery. I’d be able to get through four hours class on a charge. Back at that time, the “silver paint” junk was much cheaper and in reach to a poor student 😂
Great video as usual! I remember following you on twitter I think some years ago and when you uploaded “the history of home video” I fell in love with the channel and the lives too. Your thoughts are always very interesting to listen to and I’m glad this TH-cam career is working for you :> All the best from Italy!
21:57 - Nope, it existed, primarily because windows vista started to go with the idea of "break everything into a TON of tiny files, instead of monolithic ones, as to easily save ram by unloading unused objects." Spinning rust drives were AWEFUL at this... as they didn't have random reads, and would take forever to load so many small files, vs large ones. EG: compare copying/writing a ton of small files that are 200kb each and total 1gb, vs one large file of the same size.
I love CRD. All my homies love CRD. (Seriously tho, i listen to this shit all the time to wind down. I often fall asleep and have to rewatch parts i missed, which I’m okay with since i know it helps you out. Keep up the great work!)
I was looking at that ESS chip and you can do ALOT with it. Has a 32bit processor on it and from what I can find you can configure the osd anyway you want and the development kit supported a rom emulator so you could build it very fast. Seems like it would have seperate sdram and a rom on board but beyond that it looks easy to use on anything.
I have a mouse somewhere in my collection that slides out of a cardbus or pcmcia slot (can't remember exactly... Then you pop out a foot to angle the rear up and it's a mini rechargeable mouse wherever you want it :)
I’ve complimented you before on how your scripts get better and better. You have always been original and hilarious with your wry jokes and your overall approach, but I want to, once again, compliment your writing here. Very good!
Even though I've heard it several times now, there is something familiar and satisfying about listening to the explanation of the Quick Start premise every time.
12:57 almost, just there are two heights: 12.7mm and 9.5mm. I crammed a 12.7mm drive into a docking station only accepting 9.5mm ones, needed to remove some metal shield that probably adapted 9.5mm to 12.7mm actually. Yes, I was surprised.
they use diodes to prevent the signals from going the wrong way when in the separate modes. It is connected to both chips; just with diodes on each circut.
To aesthetically complete the drive, you can carefully remove the bezel from another drive and place onto another drive. It might work, if your drive manufacturer is similar or design is similar. The drive bezel has a few clips.
My guess is that DVD player chip has a passthru mode where the laptop can access the drive and the screen right through it. Or it might even _be_ a drive controller and display adapter. The laptop is probably just "input 2" on it, with the menus disabled.
The cheap silver paint thing is weird. It got used on a lot of products that really were meant for the landfill, but also quite a few innovative products, especially in the home/portable audio niche. My first portable mp3 player was a no-name thing that could play mp3s off of CDs (and I still can't find anybody who's reviewed one) yet beat Rio to that game by about six months. Or that DigMedia portable + dock mp3 thing. Despite the design flaws, that sure was unique and early to market. And that was only a couple years before this laptop.
Likewise my first "mp3 player" was a CD player from Panasonic or somebody that I've never been able to find again - and it was completely drenched in silver paint, but it worked great.
@@CathodeRayDude I think maybe I have stumbled across the one I had. It was either a "Genica MPTrip" or a generic version, as I recall seeing the same thing under a bunch of different names at the time. All identical but for the stickers, all with super cheap mechanisms and clunky interfaces and dodgy car kits, but it worked, and it worked before the Rio Volt came out - which I also ended up with a while later because it was a lot less janky and could handle more types of CDR/CDRWs, if I remember right. I'm pretty sure the MPTrip was even able to play the audio portion of some video files, or VCDs, or something. The levels were all wrong and there was a ton of extra noise (sync signals being treated like mp3 data?) but it sorta-kinda worked.
The point is here is "cheap products." Innovative or not, those low-budget first-to-market devices were released by little no-name startups that didn't have the budget to manufacture nice brushed aluminum lids. So, injection-molded plastic with a spray tan had to be close enough.
My understanding for why these old speakers always get so scratchy is that they seal the components together with a glue that isn't particularly long-lasting. Over time it loses adhesion, meaning that the parts don't move together the way they should. As a result you get that blown-out cronchy sound. Not sure if this was mentioned in a comment over the past couple days but you mentioned it in the video and, as an owner of a couple older laptops with that issue myself, was curious about it as well and that was (to the degree I'm even remembering correctly) the best explanation I could find.
On the matter of all laptop DVD drives being the same. I actually had to make use of this a while back when the drive in my good laptop died and I had to pull a drive out of an old laptop from when I was like 12, and the only problem was the slightly different mounting bracket which was fixed with 3 screws.
18:38 OMG...seeing that remote pop out reminded me that I had a Dell laptop that had the same feature...and coincidentally, was all silver like this one and had media buttons along the front too! I'm looking at old pictures and I want to say it was the Dell Inspiron 6400? If it wasn't that exact model, it DEF had that form factor/design.
That is honestly amazing! I would've loved to have one back in the day. Hell, something like this would be nice even these days, as I use my laptop as a media device first. But booting directly to the media player without Windows would still be an awesome feature I would love to see today.
I owned one of these, purchased from a discount reseller in 2006. I used it in college until I ended up with a Toshiba and sold this to a friend. It was by no means spectacular, but it was good enough to do "office" style work, like email, word processing, and even light graphic work.
That's a very happy looking headphone/microphone/IR receiver combo. :D I was actually wondering if it came with a remote, long lost no doubt. But there it was! Hidden in plain sight. Actually kinda cool way to store something like that.
1:27 Kind of like Chrome Vanadium steel in tools. Long ago, seeing a "Chrome Vanadium" Mark used to mean something, but nowadays it's essentially just advertising that your tool was made in China or India by the lowest bidder.
You know this laptop reminds me a lot of the Panasonic they may use silver paint but underneath they're made of a brick of magnesium. the Let's Note, and the lighter-duty Toughbooks come to mind. Panasonic tried to innovate with the let's note, but realized that it was confusing the older japanese folk so they just continually make them exactly the same until this very day, circle trackpad, top-loading disc drive(most of the time), VGA and all. I don't think I need to explain the toughbooks though, they made a lighter-duty one that looks more like a normal laptop, no handles, just a really well built laptop with some more reinforcements than the normal laptop.
Wow. I used my emachines 466is for quite some time and at least as of a few years ago - it still works. The wiggly tail mouse cursor in the BIOS still gets me every time.
Fascinating. I miss PCMCIA slots card bus had so much going for it in laptops. The neat little things like built-in remote or a little slot covers I popped one out of a laptop one day it actually had a little ruler and other little guides on it.
Well that's a cool Easter egg during the credits. The names scrolling on the left side start at the bottom of the screen "behind" your desk, and I know this because I can see the glimmer of the letters as they pass by your screw drivers. Either your screw drivers have the same chroma key color as your background, or they are reflecting the color from your background! Fun!
13:00 There actually is two different heights for (at least) SATA laptop DVD/BD drives. Regular drives are about 1.5x the height of the newer slimline drives. (A good example is the Ultrabay Enhanced/Ultrabay Slim on early 2010 thinkpads like the T420 vs the T420s) Slimline drives will still fit into a regular slot, but not the other way around.
20:29 I had a top-trim toshiba my granddad gave me when he got a good cell phone lol (he got a way smaller laptop) and it had all of these features including a remote exactly like that that slotted into an expansion slot as a 'holder'. I watched that qosimo video, I think maybe mine was the version before or after and had satellite not qosimo branding.
The chassis bowing when you pressed that power button made me flinch. And also that keyboard, decent as it could be, still looks rancid. Helvetica font was* the silver paint of 2000s keyboards. Always on the cheapest possible things you could get. Although it was the 2000s, so any mass market keyboard was awful. After the late 90s the cost cutting in the keyboard world really became a race to the bottom. *I'm 24, so per my idealized version of the 2000s, but my experience still checks out.
@@hax0rz36 Loads of high quality 80s and 90s keyboards had them, but by the 2000s it looks like it was used primarily by the cheapest keyboards out there, or by companies that were in that business since the 80s (IBM/Lenovo and Cherry come to mind). If PC vendors wanted their keyboard to look more "high quality", they would use a keyboard with a smaller and all-lowercase labels, and a font similar to Segoe UI. At least Dell and HP did it this way
I did that DVD drive swap thing when the VAIO I bought some time ago came with a dead DVD drive. I used the one from my Dell laptop til I was able to get a VAIO appropriate one.
@@volvo09 The VAIO didn’t even use a special adapter plate, nor did the Dell. I could have saved money in 2001 by getting the CD-ROM version, then swapping the drive out. lol
Jack of all trades. Master of none. Funny that you mentioned a SiS chipset. I was taking apart a PC with a highly integrated Socket 370 motherboard, of course with a Mendocino Celeron also with a SiS chipset. The manual did indeed mention MPEG2 decoding. Though hardware decoding in those times was not really standardized and just plain weird. Never got that to work on XP with an ATI card that can do MPEG2 and H264.
![Quick Start Gaiden Ep 3: A Two For One Deal [MSI MEGA]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/_B-fosEwTOw/mqdefault.jpg)
![Quick Start Gaiden Ep 3: A Two For One Deal [MSI MEGA]](/img/tr.png)
Update: Have been informed that this was also sold as the MSI M610. I figured there would be an MSI version, so that tracks, although we don't know whether it was the original and this is the rebrand or vice versa.
Oversight pointed out by a patron: VLC is certainly decoding the DVD in software, but the original e.g. PowerDVD very possibly interfaced with a hardware codec, most likely in the GPU (such as it is.) I can't find docs on the SiS M741, but a manual for a motherboard with an integrated SiS _chipset_ suggests it had MPEG2 decoding, and frankly it would just be surprising for the era if it didn't.
That said, I double checked: I installed a generic copy of PowerDVD and found that it's more efficient than VLC by about 5-6 watts, but still uses software. The CPU was still at 65%, power consumption was 40-45W, and the "use hardware acceleration" checkbox was greyed out.
So A) VLC is grossly inefficient (who's surprised) but B) powerdvd doesn't really move the needle that much. Its still possible they had a custom version that DID leverage a hardware codec... but that would barely make a difference, because the idle power consumption (CPU at 0-1%) is 35-38W. I had checked this during scriptwriting, but I should have actually captured the figures and made that point on camera.
In any case, it's moot - even if the GPU could decode MPEG2 in only 1-2 watts, the idle power consumption is still twice what the _entire DVD ASIC pulls,_ so this would still struggle to make it through a feature length film.
Also, regarding ESS: Their chips were never on sound blasters, but I've thought they were for about _twenty years_ because ESS used nearly identical model numbers to Ensoniq, who _did_ get used on Sound Blasters. ES1868 vs ES1371 - same prefix, similar looking numbers, frequently mentioned in close proximity to each other, but completely unrelated products.
If memory serves this thing software rendered out of the box when playing dvd's in windows. It could not play a feature length dvd on battery when in windows. Honestly you could barely eek out two hours windows battery run time in any use case. It was an awful laptop.
😊
Also, the S-video was probably deliberately disabled because they didn't want to pay the extra Macrovision license for external playback.
@@RealNovgorod I could be wrong, but I would expect that to be built into the cost of the Videodrive chip. There's something about it in the datasheet, but It could be optional, so, fair point.
@@CathodeRayDude I'm just spitballin' as well, but I think the copyright mafia fees apply to end products, i.e. "players", not ICs/components.
25:20 "All the other machines are trash" No. The pheonix hyperspace option of turning system sleep into restless night terrors is wild, genius, terrible, and in a vacuum deserves to exist because somebody put way more engineering prowess into that problem than it deserved.
Nothing prepared me for that VCR Splitting in half
This comment prepared me for it.
Robots in the skies
Yeah but I couldnt understand it proper when i was young
that machine was approximately 800 times more interesting than the DVD player, we really should have more stupidly modular tech on CRD
Your comment in the comment preview did
VCR switch
"I'm going to debloat my Windows installation!"
Said Windows install: 19:28
I recall doing aweful things to my Windows Vista installation to get it to run smoothly, tearing out various services and subsystems based on sketchy guides online. It never did.
@@LordVarkson Windows Vista's biggest problem was that flash memory hadn't proliferated the mainstream yet, mainly because the major computer assemblers saw no benefits.
Now that it has, every Windows version after 7 is a slog to use with mechanical hard drives.
atlasos be like
@@Code7Unltdhonestly windows 8/8.1 is actually a fair bit faster on a hard drive than 7. But windows 10 post about version 1703 just crawls on a hard drive
That line about not wanting to admit that your computer isnt the solution to every problem is deep and true
When I saw the DVD interface, I recognized it immediately, this interface was very famous in Chinese DVD players, years ago I fixed a DVD with a corrupt firmware, it was an Apex AD1500, when I opened it there was a DVD IDE drive inside. I still have this DVD player, I've already replaced the drive twice with PC parts. I also discovered at the time that there was a community that created modified firmwares for DVD players based on the ESS Videodrive, adding features and removing region locks.
Wow, I need to look into that. You're the second person to mention having an apex player with this exact interface, so it sounds like they were a major user. I may actually have to scrape up an example and see if I can get that special firmware on it
@@CathodeRayDude I'd definitely be into a video about that!
Yep, and I think I had an (unbranded) external hard drive enclosure that could also hook up to a TV to play videos, it had its own remote, and I do remember it both had a big ESS chip and made the same start-up sound, so I think it ran on the same chip!
(Edit: I think it was unbranded and called "Portable HDD media player" or something along those lines. It took an IDE hard drive but I think there was also a SATA version, as well as one that took a SATA hard drive and could record composite A/V)
Where can u find that type of stuff at
I think I have this model APEX DVD player. It came from the factory with a hidden menu that let you turn off content protection, allowing you to copy a DVD to VHS. If I recall, the menu said something like "you should not be here"
"This is just a PC with a passenger that they let drive sometimes"
CRD 2024
never have i related to a pc so much
Haha, I imagined those cars for students with two sets of pedals, but in this case they are on right back passenger seat, covered with a carpet and let u “control” car only when it’s off in a parking lot 😄 but you can listen to the music, so…
35:13 I did, but only because LGR did a 'history of eMachines' video and brought it up. I would have had zero idea otherwise.
Also, that detachable Kodak VCR that plugs into the camera was an awesome piece of tech. They all should have worked that way.
There's also a Computer Clan (Krazy Ken) episode about the eOne where it's mentioned.
I absolutely lost it at the "why am I staring over there" part
the on-video optical drive explosion makes this an instant classic.
I used to have that very model. I liked it pretty well, actually. Good keyboard, large size, and while your speakers are blown, the sound was actually excellent. Mine came with a 7200 rpm hard drive.
When it got long in the tooth, it handled Linux like a champ.
I actually used the DVD player function a lot. I bought it for a deployment overseas in my military days, and so watching movies was one of its main jobs, the other one being a DAW using an interface that lived in the PCI slot. There was never a bootleg DVD made that it couldn't play. It was the ideal cheap deployment laptop in 2005.
This is my exact same story. Bought it from AAFES.
I bought two of these off my boss at a local computer builder/repairer after a family traded them in. He only asked for $20 each because he was convinced they were overheating fire hazards and wanted them out of the building. Flipped one to a friend who needed it for college and used the other on and off for years. I never actually used the dvd system much but I do recall that trying to play a 720p MP4 would take 95-100% of the cpu. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
This reminds me of a video I saw the other day about a modern Android tablet/DVD player combo. It's similar in that the DVD player is completely separate from Android, except that the way they connected them together is with an app that requires camera permissions. They connected the DVD player to Android by pretending the video output from the player is a camera. Amazing.
That idea sounds so amazingly Chinese :D
I mean, it's clever, but it's also how most PC video capture devices work, so it's not without precedent, at least
@@THEmuteKi I thought that they had gotten a disc drive working in Android and then implemented a DVD player for Android, that would’ve been neat.
I wonder what the chances are that the connection between the player and the tablet is Analog. Reusing the chips from those EasyCap devices.
So you still have Android running in the background, negating any battery savings. Neat!
@@nooneinpartif Samsung made a tablet with dvd player, they would more likely put a DVD-RW Drive in the tablet, and install drivers and MPEG plugins to the Android OS
Ever since Ninja Gaiden on the Commodore 64 I have not known what 'Gaiden' means and that is still true today
"side story"
Same here. Plus a long time ago, i thought it was an european word and pronounced it completely wrong. I'm Lithuanian-German and similar words do exist in european languages and accents. Only found out about it being japanese after someone told me.
Thank you! I'm in the same boat as the OP lol. @@CathodeRayDude
@@CathodeRayDude so then, was Ninja Gaiden just a side story to the classic Cannon Films anthology of Ninja movies?
i thought it was ninja garden
Gravis Beacon over here with that typing test!
"and thats how you KNOW you're watching QuickStart...." Thats fuckin classic!
Also, as a kid I would've LOVED that VCR Camera combo.
When the skibidi toilet does the vcr camera men: waow
I was blown away when you brought out the Kodak MVS! My grandfather worked for Eastman Kodak for decades and he was showing me his MVS over the holidays. He has has tons of tapes but his recorder is broken, and because the MVS records in a slightly different format from other video 8 systems the tapes can't just be ripped with another device. And nobody has the resources to fix them! I'd actually meant to ask if you knew anything about these and if they were worth a video, but here it is!
That's really cool! If you still have those tapes, the vhs-decode project might give you a way to recover the footage with a working Video8 player - they've added support for a lot of formats in the last couple years.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll take a look!
Had a chuckle at that blown speakers xp login sound
Didn't every cheap laptop sound like that? The speakers aren't blown, they just have no excursion at all, so any sound louder than a gnat farting would cause them to clip.
@@nickwallette6201 exactly this. Not blown... just crappy dac + crappy amp + crappy tiny speakers = this crap right out of the box. Was so common.
Hell yeah, blow out my speakers, daddy. Crush my bits
I really liked this one. Very clever way to bury the lede early on talking about portable DVD players! I always assumed Averatec was an arm or wholly owned subsidiary of Acer, so that too was an interesting revelation.
I miss how laptops used to have front panel buttons like that. Back in the day, I had this Toshiba A25 with those front panel buttons that I'd received as a high school graduation gift. I'd put it in my laptop bag with the buttons facing up and the zipper undone and route my headphones through the bag. I'd then set the power options in Windows to never go to sleep and leave Winamp running with my whole music library and proceed to walk to and from work with 2004's chunkiest iPod. No clue how the Pentium 4 in that thing didn't cook itself alive during the process.
It was a p4 mobile, very different creature compared to the hot momma used in desktops.
That is a horrific hack, but given the era that's a clever one too. If I did that with my laptop with front buttons (Core 2 Duo), it'd probably melt the battery or something tragic.
I almost snorted my coffee when the DVD drive exploded
The answer to the screen part is the MStar MST9131A chip at the bottom left. It's a part with no public documentation, but according to some monitor service manuals, it's a video scaler with VGA+DVI input and LVDS output. The computer side must be connected through DVI, by the SiS 301MV DVI transmitter next to that chip, and the DVD player side through VGA, as those often had.
It might not actually need to use a separate (in this case, analog) video port. Many buses can be tri-stated, i.e. the driving device is put into a high-impedance mode that allows other components to take over the bus. It's often as easy as de-asserting the Chip Select or W and R lines.
If that's the case here, then yes, it literally just connects the video card's digital output to the DVD codec's digital output and the LCD's input. In this case, the scaler might be in between the two source and the LCD, if it's being leveraged for scaling low-resolution PC graphics to full screen. Or, it might be chained to the codec, and the PC's graphics card would T up to the scaler and LCD junction point.
That part about combining expensive devices definitely rings true, even into the 2000s as things were starting to get cheaper. I remember my dad specifically buying a laptop that could be used both for work and as a portable DVD player to keep my entertained on long trips, and settling on this one because of this very feature. Like you, though, we had an inverter and I don't remember if I ever actually used it on battery. I seem to remember that ours had a DVD _burner_, and it was also our first DVD burner in the house. I have vague memories of doing some kind of janky network sharing to burn backup DVDs.
I hadn't expected to see it in this series, and I've always been curious about how exactly it worked, so I was super excited to see this video. It's wild thinking about how much power this approach saved; I think modern hardware is so efficient that having to spin a DVD drive up versus streaming from disc would kill any savings from such an approach (unless you were trying to software decode AV1 or something, but that's not really comparable).
Your jump from the sudden passing of the DVD drive was incredible
Also I miss the Quick Start theme music, its so catchy and Homestar-y c:
holy moly. didnt think id see my favorite channel covering something so familiar. my father used to own one of these, in fact its still sitting in the closet in our house. he always told me how great it was for when he was on short flights, being able to bring all of his torrented movies he would burn onto discs and bring with him to watch. i can attest to those remote controls being cheaply made garbage - his only worked for a short while before the battery died, and after he changed it, it just stopped working entirely. i remember being entertained by it on long car rides where dad would pop a movie in and plop it in my lap in the back seat of the car with cars or bugs life or something. as a kid i thought it was the coolest thing. great video!
As an Averatec 3200 owner I can confidently say these machines were an INSANE value at the time. As a poor kid going into college I needed to buy the biggest bang for my buck and was surprised to find this brand. I used it for several years before I sold it for $50 to a friend who used it to play DVDs. BTW, I also had a Soulmate MP3 player. You keep finding these forgotten devices that had a huge impact on my childhood. Thank you for this amazing content!
hahaha holy crap, what are the chances? Yeah, I mean, I'd say the Averatec is *the best portable DVD player I've ever seen.* That screen alone is terrific.
I want an hour long video of Gravis typing the script to Bee Movie so I have some typing ASMR to listen to at bedtime.
Weird kink but im in
i presume he would be doing it from memory, no less
Quick start is my favourite series. I'm going to be keeping this as a little treat before bed
I've never been very impressed by a portable DVD player until I saw that remote pop out lol
HP continued this trend with their Pavilion and Touchsmart laptops, which would have an IR remote hidden in Expresscard slot (both in 54 mm and 34 mm versions).
@@adameichler good to know!
The moment when you took out the CPU was gold.
Why does the cpu not have and thermal paste
@@scottmm78 was cheaper and easier to use some sort of thermal tape that did the job well enough because the CPU put out only like 15-20w max heat.
Fun fact: ESS still exists today, and shockingly well-regarded, but in the audiophile market. Their Saber DACs are known to be VERY analytical, and they even make high-end headphones.
The LG phones I've owned generally have used their DACs
Absolutely love this series!
My mother used to have an Asus Laptop that I am pretty sure had a similar system, but limited to CD playback. Some googling seems to suggest it is called "Asus Audio DJ Stand By Music System" and one model that had it was the "Asus Pro 60".
In the early 2000's you could rent one of those portable DVD players at Amtrak train stations so you wouldn't hurt your neck watching whatever movie they would be showing on the tiny CRTs hanging from the ceiling in the train during the trip. By 2005 I was watching movies on Amtrak with a tiny Creative Zen Vision.
7:50 I genuinely thought for a second you were gonna come back with a toaster/fridge combo
It's 5am here in Australia, I have a jam donut and a coffee, and there's a new CRD episode. Life is good
I love this series. Being only slightly older, I remember seeing portable dvd players when their first came out at places like circuit city but interestingly I never knew anyone with one. 2001+ in college we were downloading movies off of Scour, hotline, etc and burning them to CDs. It wasn’t uncommon to have a binder of CDs, usually movies split into two 700 MB files… all before torrents. Thus a pc required for your dorm room movie watching. Good times.
I have nothing interesting to contribute to this conversation. I just wanted to compliment the writing of this video. That description of e-waste was so well written. I especially loved describing AliExpress as a speedrun website. Lol It's funny because it's true and I laugh at things that depress me. Great video.
Nothing on TH-cam gets me more excited than seeing you have released a new video!
There are few content creators that make me immediately click
Man, this IS a really neat idea! Before you even said it I was thinking, this is another perfect dorm room laptop.
Imagine a machine like this with a burner drive: Acquire *perfectly legal* MP3s, burn a mix CD, shut down the PC and restart in DVD player mode, and listen! If you added some okay external speakers, it could've worked as a passable stand-in for a compact stereo as well.
Your comment about eMachines all having blown caps had me side eye my fully working eOne sitting on the table next to me. Then you mentioned the eOne was originally not meant to be an eMachines, which probably explains it.
I cracked with "the new level of breaking a computer: the unistalling of the windows volume control".😂
The VCR/camera ad filmed at the beach had me going, can you imagine cleaning sand out of a VCR
I like how everything that "you'll never guess" is always the most obvious solution
right, because the industry never goes with obvious solutions! you'd never guess it because it makes too much sense!
Averatec brings me back to university. Bought one September 2002 for first year. Lasted until 2007.
Mine was a laptop first DVD/CD-RW model. That laptop was thinner than this one - slightly thicker than the SVGA port - and relatively light with a decent battery. I’d be able to get through four hours class on a charge.
Back at that time, the “silver paint” junk was much cheaper and in reach to a poor student 😂
Great video as usual! I remember following you on twitter I think some years ago and when you uploaded “the history of home video” I fell in love with the channel and the lives too. Your thoughts are always very interesting to listen to and I’m glad this TH-cam career is working for you :> All the best from Italy!
I love these quickstart videos. Lots of creative engineering went into these machines. And sometimes they were good. 😄
21:57 - Nope, it existed, primarily because windows vista started to go with the idea of "break everything into a TON of tiny files, instead of monolithic ones, as to easily save ram by unloading unused objects."
Spinning rust drives were AWEFUL at this... as they didn't have random reads, and would take forever to load so many small files, vs large ones.
EG: compare copying/writing a ton of small files that are 200kb each and total 1gb, vs one large file of the same size.
I love CRD. All my homies love CRD.
(Seriously tho, i listen to this shit all the time to wind down. I often fall asleep and have to rewatch parts i missed, which I’m okay with since i know it helps you out. Keep up the great work!)
I was looking at that ESS chip and you can do ALOT with it. Has a 32bit processor on it and from what I can find you can configure the osd anyway you want and the development kit supported a rom emulator so you could build it very fast. Seems like it would have seperate sdram and a rom on board but beyond that it looks easy to use on anything.
Was waiting for the HP card is remote, was not disappoint. Had one of those I got hand-me-down, lol.
I have a mouse somewhere in my collection that slides out of a cardbus or pcmcia slot (can't remember exactly... Then you pop out a foot to angle the rear up and it's a mini rechargeable mouse wherever you want it :)
17:35 the HRT laptop!!
HRT laptop? Slow and doesn't qualify in first race of season? :D #f1fansknowit
Reminds me almost of a particular moment during the Qosmio episode with that bottle cap..
"h r t ?"
yes please
I’ve complimented you before on how your scripts get better and better. You have always been original and hilarious with your wry jokes and your overall approach, but I want to, once again, compliment your writing here. Very good!
What do you use for recording audio?
The return of the best series.
'Perfect size for a laptop' ... gets me every time.
Even though I've heard it several times now, there is something familiar and satisfying about listening to the explanation of the Quick Start premise every time.
7:03 for computers, the cause and solution to every problem 🥂
12:57 almost, just there are two heights: 12.7mm and 9.5mm. I crammed a 12.7mm drive into a docking station only accepting 9.5mm ones, needed to remove some metal shield that probably adapted 9.5mm to 12.7mm actually. Yes, I was surprised.
I audibly gasped when you took that VHS module off and plugged it into the camera. I wasnt expecting that to be possible.
My brain was not ready for 9:03, what a weird but genius solution
they use diodes to prevent the signals from going the wrong way when in the separate modes. It is connected to both chips; just with diodes on each circut.
This is the most underrated idea of the device I've ever seen in my life
To aesthetically complete the drive, you can carefully remove the bezel from another drive and place onto another drive. It might work, if your drive manufacturer is similar or design is similar. The drive bezel has a few clips.
Not gonna lie, I've grown to like this toaster-fridge in the time I watched this video
Best fridge-toaster ever
My guess is that DVD player chip has a passthru mode where the laptop can access the drive and the screen right through it. Or it might even _be_ a drive controller and display adapter. The laptop is probably just "input 2" on it, with the menus disabled.
I love this series. I'll be sad when you eventually run out of weird old machines to cover.
brb gonna put a raspberry pi pico and an old-stock portable dvd player chip into an oem laptop, with horribly slow emmc memory
The cheap silver paint thing is weird. It got used on a lot of products that really were meant for the landfill, but also quite a few innovative products, especially in the home/portable audio niche. My first portable mp3 player was a no-name thing that could play mp3s off of CDs (and I still can't find anybody who's reviewed one) yet beat Rio to that game by about six months. Or that DigMedia portable + dock mp3 thing. Despite the design flaws, that sure was unique and early to market. And that was only a couple years before this laptop.
Likewise my first "mp3 player" was a CD player from Panasonic or somebody that I've never been able to find again - and it was completely drenched in silver paint, but it worked great.
@@CathodeRayDude I think maybe I have stumbled across the one I had. It was either a "Genica MPTrip" or a generic version, as I recall seeing the same thing under a bunch of different names at the time. All identical but for the stickers, all with super cheap mechanisms and clunky interfaces and dodgy car kits, but it worked, and it worked before the Rio Volt came out - which I also ended up with a while later because it was a lot less janky and could handle more types of CDR/CDRWs, if I remember right.
I'm pretty sure the MPTrip was even able to play the audio portion of some video files, or VCDs, or something. The levels were all wrong and there was a ton of extra noise (sync signals being treated like mp3 data?) but it sorta-kinda worked.
The point is here is "cheap products." Innovative or not, those low-budget first-to-market devices were released by little no-name startups that didn't have the budget to manufacture nice brushed aluminum lids. So, injection-molded plastic with a spray tan had to be close enough.
Cripes, I figured I was the only one who got excited to see the DVD screensaver logo thing bounce off the corner.
It went big in an episode of The Office so I guess now it's a thing
My understanding for why these old speakers always get so scratchy is that they seal the components together with a glue that isn't particularly long-lasting. Over time it loses adhesion, meaning that the parts don't move together the way they should. As a result you get that blown-out cronchy sound. Not sure if this was mentioned in a comment over the past couple days but you mentioned it in the video and, as an owner of a couple older laptops with that issue myself, was curious about it as well and that was (to the degree I'm even remembering correctly) the best explanation I could find.
its either that or the plastic membranes degrade, could also be a bit of both.
Great episode once again! Really great to see you crank out videos again considering the new years update. ❤
This was a truly entertaining presentation for another fascinating technical turducken. I am really enjoying this series.
On the matter of all laptop DVD drives being the same. I actually had to make use of this a while back when the drive in my good laptop died and I had to pull a drive out of an old laptop from when I was like 12, and the only problem was the slightly different mounting bracket which was fixed with 3 screws.
18:38 OMG...seeing that remote pop out reminded me that I had a Dell laptop that had the same feature...and coincidentally, was all silver like this one and had media buttons along the front too! I'm looking at old pictures and I want to say it was the Dell Inspiron 6400? If it wasn't that exact model, it DEF had that form factor/design.
That is honestly amazing! I would've loved to have one back in the day. Hell, something like this would be nice even these days, as I use my laptop as a media device first.
But booting directly to the media player without Windows would still be an awesome feature I would love to see today.
😂 your maniacal laugh when it played without a CPU! Only a true nerd would be so amused ❤
my dude you uploaded right when i needed something to watch
I just so hope, his style will be the thing that makes his channel pop
HELL YEAH MORE QUICKSTART BABY LETS GOOO
I owned one of these, purchased from a discount reseller in 2006. I used it in college until I ended up with a Toshiba and sold this to a friend. It was by no means spectacular, but it was good enough to do "office" style work, like email, word processing, and even light graphic work.
That's a very happy looking headphone/microphone/IR receiver combo. :D I was actually wondering if it came with a remote, long lost no doubt. But there it was! Hidden in plain sight. Actually kinda cool way to store something like that.
1:27 Kind of like Chrome Vanadium steel in tools. Long ago, seeing a "Chrome Vanadium" Mark used to mean something, but nowadays it's essentially just advertising that your tool was made in China or India by the lowest bidder.
Yeah, pick up a tool and see that, put it right back down...
You know this laptop reminds me a lot of the Panasonic they may use silver paint but underneath they're made of a brick of magnesium. the Let's Note, and the lighter-duty Toughbooks come to mind.
Panasonic tried to innovate with the let's note, but realized that it was confusing the older japanese folk so they just continually make them exactly the same until this very day, circle trackpad, top-loading disc drive(most of the time), VGA and all.
I don't think I need to explain the toughbooks though, they made a lighter-duty one that looks more like a normal laptop, no handles, just a really well built laptop with some more reinforcements than the normal laptop.
bout gave me a heart attack with that late game reveal. speaking of blown caps, is there space for a video covering the capacitator plague?
The Thinkpad i 1482 also had media control buttons on the front with a display.
I hope you've seen Portlandia: Instant Garbage. It's exactly how you describe the off-brand plastic tech junk.
Finally, the perfect size for a laptop
15:45 Oh you know I’m eagerly waiting for it honey
7:52 - For a second I was expecting you to grab a Fridgster… ^^
I can't add much on the tech side, BUT! Loving the font on the "Gaiden"!
Wow. I used my emachines 466is for quite some time and at least as of a few years ago - it still works. The wiggly tail mouse cursor in the BIOS still gets me every time.
Fascinating. I miss PCMCIA slots card bus had so much going for it in laptops. The neat little things like built-in remote or a little slot covers I popped one out of a laptop one day it actually had a little ruler and other little guides on it.
It's a good day when Gravis uploads.
Well that's a cool Easter egg during the credits. The names scrolling on the left side start at the bottom of the screen "behind" your desk, and I know this because I can see the glimmer of the letters as they pass by your screw drivers. Either your screw drivers have the same chroma key color as your background, or they are reflecting the color from your background! Fun!
13:00 There actually is two different heights for (at least) SATA laptop DVD/BD drives. Regular drives are about 1.5x the height of the newer slimline drives. (A good example is the Ultrabay Enhanced/Ultrabay Slim on early 2010 thinkpads like the T420 vs the T420s)
Slimline drives will still fit into a regular slot, but not the other way around.
Excellent episode. Thank you.
20:29 I had a top-trim toshiba my granddad gave me when he got a good cell phone lol (he got a way smaller laptop) and it had all of these features including a remote exactly like that that slotted into an expansion slot as a 'holder'. I watched that qosimo video, I think maybe mine was the version before or after and had satellite not qosimo branding.
The chassis bowing when you pressed that power button made me flinch.
And also that keyboard, decent as it could be, still looks rancid. Helvetica font was* the silver paint of 2000s keyboards. Always on the cheapest possible things you could get. Although it was the 2000s, so any mass market keyboard was awful. After the late 90s the cost cutting in the keyboard world really became a race to the bottom.
*I'm 24, so per my idealized version of the 2000s, but my experience still checks out.
Helvetica was also on the Models F and M, so...
@@hax0rz36 Loads of high quality 80s and 90s keyboards had them, but by the 2000s it looks like it was used primarily by the cheapest keyboards out there, or by companies that were in that business since the 80s (IBM/Lenovo and Cherry come to mind). If PC vendors wanted their keyboard to look more "high quality", they would use a keyboard with a smaller and all-lowercase labels, and a font similar to Segoe UI. At least Dell and HP did it this way
I did that DVD drive swap thing when the VAIO I bought some time ago came with a dead DVD drive. I used the one from my Dell laptop til I was able to get a VAIO appropriate one.
Yeah I added a burner to a laptop by just figuring it out randomly... Luckily the cover fit with slight modification.
@@volvo09 The VAIO didn’t even use a special adapter plate, nor did the Dell. I could have saved money in 2001 by getting the CD-ROM version, then swapping the drive out. lol
I love his history reminders 😊
I’ll let you know that I’m neither a computer nor a hardware nerd and yet I love your shit
Jack of all trades. Master of none.
Funny that you mentioned a SiS chipset. I was taking apart a PC with a highly integrated Socket 370 motherboard, of course with a Mendocino Celeron also with a SiS chipset. The manual did indeed mention MPEG2 decoding. Though hardware decoding in those times was not really standardized and just plain weird. Never got that to work on XP with an ATI card that can do MPEG2 and H264.