look at what's inside

Perhaps, it is comparable to a $500 PC, but does something with 2.5 Ghz P4 and 1 GB of RAM sound like something that should be "slow"? It's also not booting up a full ride WinXP OS, either. So I don't think much is explained about what could remotely make for bootups slower than 4 or 5 fingersnaps, imo.


Perhaps, it is using the world's worst optimized compile of RedHat Linux, but I'm not thinking that is a likely explanation. Could it be the interactive features layer is excruciatingly inefficient and bloated?


Given the hardware choice to implement this player, it seems the media functionality should have extended quite a bit further than just playing HD-DVD's. Would it not seem there is plenty of resources available to host a full-blown media server/hub? Perhaps this model is simply a test vehicle for a full blown media server version to come later? It really seems a hair trigger away from this kind of duty just by adding a harddrive and a running copy of Vista, no?


Perhaps there is a non-compete stipulation in effect for the time being?

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Don't disagree, but if the studios want to replace all those SD-DVD players and movie titles with HD/BD-DVD then they need to make these things cheaper and simpler (not to mention more reliable) not bigger, more expensive, and more buggy (vulnerable to viruses, for example). Still, it does offer potential for considerable enhancements from firmware upgrades and or mods.

I completely agree dsmith. It seems the more "computer like" things get, the slower they get to become operational at first turn-on vs. the typical CE device which is ready to rock almost instantaneously. To pull similar examples, it is annoying to have to wait for my Sirius S50 to reach a user screen everytime I turn it on. It's a friggen mp3 player when portable, yet I gotta wait before I can pick something to play. My ota hd receiver has a similar annoying pause upon startup. My sd DirecTv tuner, otoh, is piping a signal in less than a second (though it terminally runs warm on the case exterior, so maybe it is "cheating").


Thinking about it further last night, I was thinking maybe the actual bootup up this hd-dvd player isn't as long as it seems. Maybe a great deal of that time, it is doing a ram check over 1 GB (like you would expect a PC to do?). That would account for quite a bit of time. Maybe they could program later versions to periodically do a memcheck during "offline" periods. ...or maybe this is a kind of device that should be "sleeped/standby'd", rather than shutdown when you are done with it, if boottime has to be such an ordeal.