Comment by peter_d_sherman
6 years ago
Great Article!
Reading it reminded me (at least to the best of my knowledge at this point in time!) that THERE ARE NO OPEN HARDWARE CD/DVD PLAYERS.
I think some person or people should attempt a completely open hardware CD and/or DVD and/or Blu-Ray player...
I'd be happy with just a completely open hardware CD player...
IMHO open software/firmware would already be far more useful, because then you could read discs at a far lower level which greatly aids in data recovery situations; something like the optical disc version of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KryoFlux , in other words.
The hardware in a drive is very high precision but otherwise quite "mundane", as the article shows.
Micah (Scanlime) did some work on a Bluray player. Brace yourself - this is a real tour the force of reverse engineering: http://vimeo.com/110257380 https://hackaday.com/2014/10/30/reverse-engineering-a-blu-ra...
There is another "independent" firmware for a bluray players, pirate one for Xbox 360 ones :) somewhat hard to get your hands on the source.