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Installing a hard drive in your Sampo DVD player

You've landed on this page and you'd be forgiven for thinking you'd walked into some sort of wirehead heaven. Hard drives ? In DVD players ? What the heck is going on here...?

When the Sampo DVE-631CF player first appeared in the States in 2001, we at Area 450 were amazed by its capabilities - a fantastically specified DVD player coupled with a Compact Flash card reader : great stuff.

Then the "what if ?" questions started to surface....as we knew the Sampo DVD players' processor boards controlled the DVD loader via an IDE interface, did that mean the CF card reader was attached by a second IDE connection ? And did that mean we could substitute the CF card reader for another bit of IDE hardware...like a hard drive ?

Couple this with the increased file support supplied by the Sampo DVE-631CF (JPG, MP3, MPG, miniDVD and VOBs), and it was therefore no wonder that the underground firmware hacking community went overboard in trying to get the DVE-631CF firmware to work on as many players fitted with ESS Videodrive chipsets as possible - hence One Firmware For All was born. Sadly, it still remains restricted to Taiwan-manufactured decks : the Chinese-made Sampo decks don't get a look in at the moment, although work continues at the OFFA group.

By that time, hard drive installations had taken some incredible twists and turns. Overcoming problems of hard drive preparation, drive letter assignment in the PC, and ensuring there was enough juice to power the drive, some folks were hitching up 200GB hard drives to their ancient, but not past it, Sampo DVD players (and a fair few Apex decks too !), with the added playback feature of a huge media jukebox : a hotch-potch of MP3 files, MPG files and all the other types supported by the DVE-631CF.

But things didn't stop there - folks were getting more ingenious : some worked out ways of transferring files painlessly to their hard drive installed in their player : removable drive bays to allow for a swift update, and it wasn't too long before USB and FireWire interfaces started to appear on the back of some hard drives to make the process even quicker and less inconvenient (there's only so many times you can remain excited by opening your PC up, after all !).

Some folks decided to leave the hard drive outside the player all together, but coupled it with other IDE devices like a DVD-ROM drive, and a Compact Flash card reader.

One mad Australian, David Booty, decided one hard drive simply was not enough - the Omnibeast was born, replete with two hard drives.

Adding hard drives is just the tip of the iceberg - there are other exciting projects where IDE hardware is added, but this is covered in the hardware mods index. To kick off this section, it's worth having a read of Craig Clontz's introduction to the whole idea of adding a hard drive - if it doesn't get you in the mood to dust off that old 20GB hard drive rattling around in your study, then nothing will !

 

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