Player

Here you will find information about the hardware.

 

Players manufactured by Guang Dong Cosmic Digital Technology are sold under names:

Please notice that there is second manufacturer of DVD/DivX/XviD players: nReady Netware Limited. They are making players that have the same front panels as Cosmic units but are NOT the same. Among this players are:

Cosmic and nReady units have the same screen menu systems because they are based on the same reference Sigma Designs framework. They have also the same front panels because there is probably third party design company. But Cosmic and nReady players have different mainboards.

Many DVD/DivX/XviD players are also manufactured by Gowell Enterprises. They also use the same front panels and are sold under others brands...

 

Now let's look to the inside of Cosmic CO-301 player:

 

The player consists of three main elements:

 

 

  1. Sigma Designs EM8500 chip. More information you can find on Sigma website, especially on EM8500 product page.
  2. 2MX32Y3VTW DRAM memory
  3. 24LC02 flash memory (2048 bits for storing user's preferences like volume, choosen language, number of region, etc)
  4. LC125A Quadruple bus buffer gate with 3-state outputs
  5. 29DL32BF flash memory (4 Mbytes for firmware)
  6. RC4558 Dual general-purpose operational amplifier (amplifies audio signal on analog stereo output)
  7. WM8725ED Digital to Analog converter (stereo audio output)
  8. (not shown on the picture) AD16312 Display/Remote sensor controller

In fact EM8500 is the 32-bit ARM class processor running at 150 MHz with built-in MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoders, IDE controller and TV encoder. The whole line of EM8500 based players are running uCLinux operating system. (Yes - your DVD player is in fact Linux powered computer!).

High quality photos of nReady player (with close-up of the mainboard) can be found here.

 

Differences between various Cosmic Digital players

Although Cosmic Digital is manufacturing a few models of DVD/DivX/XviD players, the whole line is using the same mainboard PCB and DVD drive. The only real difference is front panel design and front panel buttons mapping in firmware. As far as I know there are units equipped with DVI video output and analog 5.1 audio output, but I have never seen such player manufactured by Cosmic.

 

Player malfunction after long period of usage
(the text below (c) Etchie)

I own Elta 8882A player. But after about half year of using this player, strange things began to happen with it. I am little disappointed now 'cause I found out it has a factory hardware bug. And I think many players will be or already were affected by it. This malfunction occures only by using player for couple of months or maybe years. It depends how offen is player operated and if it is powered off by main switch or by stand-by mode. I myself repaired two Elta 8882A players with the same malfunction, but I suppose that all clones or brands which use the same power supply will act the same. Type of the power supply you can see at the picture below.
And here is why:
Because of not proper voltage +5V from power supply board whole player gets strange behavior like picture flickering, endless "Loading" message on display, green LED lit only, playing is slowed down or random skips in DVD movies etc. or player is totaly dead. There are two capacitors C20 and C21 on power supply board which are responsible for all strange things. The value of both is 1000uF/16V and this is not enough for such heavy load. I replaced them both for 2200uF/25V and now everything is OK. Also temperature of capacitors is fine now. Before the replacement I couldn't hold my finger on one of them. Now I hope this will not repeat again in future.

UPDATE:
More and more reports from users confirm: it works! At lest three additional units were fixed. If you need more detailed photos refer to the Matthew Kindy's website.
UPDATE 2:
Even more reports received! It really works! At least four additional units fixed.