4. The Technology Up Close: Opening The Case

Roomy case, with not much in it: the player consists mainly of a decoder board (left), the DVD drive and the power supply.

View of the front panel display, which shows status messages.

The main playback device is a regular DVD drive of the kind built into PCs. This drive is connected by a IDE cable to a board containing the REALmagic EM8500 encoder chip, which is currently the most powerful. In principle, the hardware can be compared with the encoder card tested by us in At Last: Hardware Decoder for MPEG-4 , except that the KiSS player manages with a minimum operating system, comparable to those used with the D-Box receivers for digital TV. All software is included in an EEPROM chip that additionally allows the firmware to be updated. The pictures below show how little hardware is found in the case of the KiSS DP-450.

The decoder board consists mainly of four chips: the REALmagic EM8500 and three memory chips (EPROM and SDRAM). The other small chips handle the digital-analog conversion of the audio and video signals and the controls of the panel.