Lorin Thwaits dissects an HD-DVD Player

Some crazy dude bought a Toshiba HD-DVD player and pulled it apart to find that its essentially an off the shelf desktop PC using a Pentium 4, a gig of PC2700 ram, and RedHat Linux stored on a 256MB NAND flash module. There’s also apparently a USB bus, and all sorts of interesting stuff in there. So - does this make the Tosh player a super-hackable ultrafun home theatre accessory? Yes….Perhaps its an adoption strategy a la Tivo to drive grassroots support; or maybe its just a rush-it-to-market design strategy byproduct.