'Just like to share my own experience with the loader replacement that I did today.
Got the liteon inserted and powered up the dvdrom (stock fw: DS08A for rom drive, Jan 2004 firmware for V880). Disc inserted. Player had great difficulty loading. When the disc finally loaded, the player jumped all over the place! Simply unacceptable tracking.
Next I tried an audio disc. No luck. Out went the dvdrom drive and back to connection to the PC. I reflashed the player to the latest 1C firmware. Did the region-free hack. Reconnected the dvd-rom ide cable and power cable while the player was in standby (red led) mode. Worse -- no disc. Nothing could get the player to recognise the audio disc inside the rom.
After half an hour of plugging the AC power in and out, I could not get the rom drive to mate with the v880. On a hunch, I remembered that the original loader did not have any jumpers installed to select Master Slave or Cable Select protocols. So I had duplicated this on the liteon. But now with nothing to lose, I placed the original jumper on Cable Select.
So as you would have guessed by now, the player could now recognise a disc. But it had problems during the loading process. Undaunted, I disconnected the AC power from the player to do a reset (the first reset I had done since putting on the jumper), and upon connection the sweet sound of disc spinning and head movement rang true. Soon I was listening to music! (maybe someone here would like to place a jumper on the a problematic momitsu loader to see if it has any effect on stutter?)
Next a dvd-r disc went in. Flawless loading and playing. No stutter. Tried other factory pressed dvd discs. No problems either.
So here are some of the things I took note of during this 5 hour process:
1) Beware the jumper setting during connection
2) When in doubt, always do a hard reset before trying something else
3) After a hard reset you may need to press the Video button repeatedly to cycle through the video output modes
4) The latest firmware DS1C (march 2004) for the liteon seems to work fine
5) The software for disabling region-locking also seems to work as advertised.
6) I was lazy, so I exposed the v880's interior and connected/disconnected the dvd-rom drive without touching the ac power cable and just using the standby mode. For others I would suggest removing the ac power cable before removing the dvdrom, and after reconnecting it, to plug in the ac power cable.
Naturally all this was done without consideration for alignment yet. Now I'll have to figure out how to get it mounted and aligned to the eject door flap before I replace the cover and sit back to enjoy stutter free movies!
This just in: Playback of divx files is smoother. Best part is, ffwd is so much faster and smoother, and return to playback mode is also quicker. This is great!
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Further news update: many of the cdrs containing divx I that recorded previously could not be played. Upon selecting the divx file the player would report that the file was not playable. I had all along assumed that it was due to incompatible encoding. Now, with the liteon, every single unplayable divx file is PLAYABLE! Every single one. Maybe it was the original loader's inability to even read the file for some reason. So we're not just talking about better divx navigation now, we're talking improved divx/xvid file support! Damn just for this alone the liteon is worth 5x the amount!
