Up close and personal with Toshiba’s new HD DVD player (the HD-A1) — Within minutes this guy and others are tearing apart the new HD-DVD to see how they really work. The DMCA be damned!

The HD-DVD drive we pulled out of the thing has a standard 40-pin IDE interface, and when connected to an XP machine identifies itself as “_NEC HDDVD HR1100A”, which is a recently-released HD-DVD reader that also reads normal DVDs and CDs.

When I put a HD-DVD movie in to try to see what’s on the disc it just says “D:\ is not accessible. Incorrect function.”. Even under Vista Beta 1 same story. Perhaps a later beta will have a driver and allow us to see what’s on these HD-DVD discs. Is it still VOB-ified or now something different under the new AACS copy protection? Or perhaps the new protection restricts you from even reading any data at all! Wouldn’t that be a kicker.

At the very end of the video I got a little curious about the daughter card stuck on the motherboard, and pry it up for a closer look. Definitely that’s where some interesting file system discoveries are to be found:

found by Sergio Gasparrini