I guess this qualifies as "retro" hardware since it's an obsolete drive that can play an obsolete media format? 🤣
I picked this bad boy up for $60 shipped! Was a good deal I couldn't resist!
http://www.ebay.com/itm/251130660024

All I did was follow this guide and crossflashed it to a GGW-H20L which enabled HD-DVD support! 😁
http://club.myce.com/f142/lg-blu-ray-crossfla … e06lu11-260811/

How cool is it my main PC can support every optical disc format under the sun (this drive can't read DVD-RAM or "print" LabelFlash discs, but my Pioneer DVR-219L can)? 😁

What about Laserdisc? 🤣

That's pretty sweet though, didn't realize you could flash it to read HD-DVD but I guess that makes sense since the hardware would be the same. If I ever come across an HD-DVD I'll have to see if my drive can do that; I have an HP bd240 drive that I got for somewhere around the same price.

there's only a handful of LG (and Buffalo) models that can be crossflashed over to the super multi blue drive because they sold them as HD-DVD/BD combo drives and later on dropped the HD-DVD because it was a dead format and it was cheaper not to redesign the hardware and not continue to pay the licensing costs 😉

what's great about this buy was, it came with an OEM copy of PowerDVD 7.3, which was the last version to support HD-DVD 😀

I got 2 laser disc players stuffed away in a closet somewhere... I have a few movies too

Got the old itch again (worse than poison oak or ivy) and bought a GT 430 as a dedicated physx card. Can't wait to get modding once it comes in the mail 😀

Pulled from an NEC box I watched a kid hack apart. Luckily the motherboard is still intact, unharmed and working. 233mhz Pentium MMX, 64mb sdram, usb, ATI Rage integrated video, and the audio comes from a Yamaha chip with integrated OPL3.

nice and uncommon board ^^ thumbsup

Yep. A shame it'll only serve as decoration. Also, I think it lacks L2 cache.

GXL750 wrote:

Yep. A shame it'll only serve as decoration. Also, I think it lacks L2 cache.

It is still a nice board and if one knows smd soldering one can add the cache from a donor board.

TheMAN wrote:

there's only a handful of LG (and Buffalo) models that can be crossflashed over to the super multi blue drive because they sold them as HD-DVD/BD combo drives and later on dropped the HD-DVD because it was a dead format and it was cheaper not to redesign the hardware and not continue to pay the licensing costs 😉

what's great about this buy was, it came with an OEM copy of PowerDVD 7.3, which was the last version to support HD-DVD 😀

I got 2 laser disc players stuffed away in a closet somewhere... I have a few movies too

That's pretty awesome. I picked up the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive for £10 (about $16) and I just rip the discs to my PC. Got a cool app called MakeMKV that doesn't re-encode the content; it just packages it in an MKV container. My Samsung TV plays the MKVs too so it's awesome! Amazing to think a tiny ARM cpu in my TV plays 30mbps HD content flawlessly compared to the first generation of Toshiba HD-DVD players that were huge machines with whole PC's in them!

nice! I got an xbox 360 drive here too... still brand new unused... I've been saving it for use with an actual 360, but other priorities kept putting acquiring a 360 behind 🙁

now I just need to find a confirmed working software player for playing CBHDs (those discs are physically the same as HD-DVDs), that way I got another cheap option for legit movies, from china 😁

TheMAN wrote:

nice! I got an xbox 360 drive here too... still brand new unused... I've been saving it for use with an actual 360, but other priorities kept putting acquiring a 360 behind 🙁

now I just need to find a confirmed working software player for playing CBHDs (those discs are physically the same as HD-DVDs), that way I got another cheap option for legit movies, from china 😁

The day the format admitted defeat, those Xbox HD-DVD drives became a cheap source of blue laser diodes. I used one in a pointer I build, pretty cool. 😀

Owning such a player will become a nifty part of history, like a Laserdisc or Betamax player.

the technology lives on, as CBHD... who knows how that will play out though, because the players were expensive when it's meant to undercut the cost of bluray (unlike HD-DVD, which wasn't intended so)!

I bought a bunch of movies at bargain basement prices back when the format lost and the prices crashed, so that's how I was able to justify getting these readers/players 😉

Call my stuck in time but, regarding the LG drive, I thought BlueRay was hip and new? Is BlueRay obsolete?

Blu-Ray is the HD standard right now. HD-DVD was the format that lost the war.

RichB93 wrote:

Blu-Ray is the HD standard right now. HD-DVD was the format that lost the war.

Really ? wow didn't know that.

This fights for the prevailing standard happen quite often: Beta vs VHS (don't know for sure if DAT vs K7 qualifies) and, well did anyone win the DVD-R vs DVD+R battle?
Anyway it's economics and technology making historory together.
R.I.P. HD-DVD

dosquest wrote:

Call my stuck in time but, regarding the LG drive, I thought BlueRay was hip and new? Is BlueRay obsolete?

Blu Ray was always obsolete, so was HD-DVD. You can buy upscaling DVD players that look just as good from normal viewing distances. The only real advantage of Blu Ray is all the bonus crap they can pack on a single disc that would require a second disc if released on DVD. And yes, before any fanboys chime in, I have all three and see no benefit of watching movies on either of the HD formats over a top quality DVD player. About the only thing that BluRay is good for is data storage. It's already being replaced by digital downloads for game content, as is DVD. It won't be long before you can't even buy media content in brick and mortar stores anymore because it will have all gone to downloads and Sony and Toshiba will both have wasted their money fighting the HD wars.

uhhh WRONG
you think upscaling a regular DVD makes it look just as good as the BD/HD version of the same movie? or how about expecting the DVD to be the same quality as "off the air" 1080i HDTV? THINK AGAIN... it is NO WHERE CLOSE

you won't be able to tell a difference if your TV was crap and/or settings way off
my mere "crappy" 60" sony xbr rear projection HDTV shows a clear difference between upscaling regular DVDs on my Toshiba HD-A35 HD-DVD player (was one of the best cheap upscalers in 2008) and HD-DVDs, and that's at a viewing distance twice the recommended (about 6.5 meters from the TV)!

so long as there are people who care about the full sensory experience of watching a movie, there will be demand for Blurays as the format further improves to larger and larger discs with more and more quality being put to it for quite a few more years

streaming videos are convenient and great, but there isn't enough internet bandwidth in the average household to allow the same quality a bluray can offer at this time, with 3D viewing requiring even MORE bandwidth... eventually we'll get there, and that is when you can declare optical media obsolete, but who knows... maybe by then, it'll be replaced yet again with a completely new format and we'll be back to square one again

IMO Blu-ray was a good development. What Full HD needed was a good quality source.

Upscaling can improve things but it can't create detail that wasn't there and MPEG-2 image glitches will also remain.

But now they are pushing for 4k resolution soon and its so detailed that the human eye can't see all the detail unless you sit very close to the TV.

I believe that 1080 was optimized for the human eye and the regular viewing distance.

TheMAN wrote:

uhhh WRONG you think upscaling a regular DVD makes it look just as good as the BD/HD version of the same movie? or how about exp […]
Show full quote

uhhh WRONG
you think upscaling a regular DVD makes it look just as good as the BD/HD version of the same movie? or how about expecting the DVD to be the same quality as "off the air" 1080i HDTV? THINK AGAIN... it is NO WHERE CLOSE

you won't be able to tell a difference if your TV was crap and/or settings way off
my mere "crappy" 60" sony xbr rear projection HDTV shows a clear difference between upscaling regular DVDs on my Toshiba HD-A35 HD-DVD player (was one of the best cheap upscalers in 2008) and HD-DVDs, and that's at a viewing distance twice the recommended (about 6.5 meters from the TV)!

so long as there are people who care about the full sensory experience of watching a movie, there will be demand for Blurays as the format further improves to larger and larger discs with more and more quality being put to it for quite a few more years

streaming videos are convenient and great, but there isn't enough internet bandwidth in the average household to allow the same quality a bluray can offer at this time, with 3D viewing requiring even MORE bandwidth... eventually we'll get there, and that is when you can declare optical media obsolete, but who knows... maybe by then, it'll be replaced yet again with a completely new format and we'll be back to square one again

3D is useless. Who needs it? It's just a way for Sony to unload all those BluRay players that nobody wants. Also, who is talking about streaming? You download the file then you watch it direct from your hard drive. That's how content will be accessed in the future. It will be like when you download a movie from XBOX Live!. If it's a rental the file has an expiration date and after that you won't be able to watch it anymore then you just delete the file because it's useless.

And seriously, if upscaled DVD isn't good enough for you, you really need to stop being so nitpicky and if you REALLY want the full experience, then you should be watching movies on a 75 foot theater screen and not on your 55" TV.