Hi there, my first post on my shiny new weblog is about my Western Digital TV Mini player. It was on sale in NL for about 30 euros and I needed something small to play movies on my TV. The device is really small and I can stick it to the back of my TV. You can find it on the WDC site at:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=681.
Before I bought this thing I also looked at the WD TV live. The advantage of that the device above the mini is that it can play HD video and has network capabilities. For the live there are some alternative firmware versions available. This inspired me to get a mini and check out the possibilities for inserting a WIFI USB dongle to get network access.
The first thing you do when you have a new gadget is open it up. A good thing there’s no waranty seal, just 4 screws located underneath the small rubber feet.
I was a bit disappointed when opening the player. There is a heat spreader assembled on the PCB right over the interesting part. It looks like there is a flash device and some other fine pitch device under it. The heat spreader is soldered to the ground plane and this really makes it a pain to get it off. I tried but need better tools to do this.
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- WDTV Mini PCB top
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- WDTV Mini PCB bottom
The PCB silk say that this is a “RMVB Media player REV-1A”, searching the web on this string results in a similar player with different outputs but the same functionality. The NAND flash is a Hynix device H27U1G8F2BTR and can hold up to 128MB, you can’t buy much smaller these days. Also on the top is an AK4421, a pretty decent 24-bit DAC that samples at 192kHz.
There are also six pins visible that are probably used for JTAG. I have not measured anything but I don’t think there’s are uart available on this thing.
The bottom is not that interesting, the only active component is a power supply. Let’s wait and see if I can remove the heat spreader. That’ll tell us what chip we are dealing with.