[bonzobanana]

I was playing 'The Fifth Element' which isn't a film I'm too bothered about as it basically came free in a 3 for 1 pack at £9.99 from Splash. The other two being Aliens and Abyss which I did want. Anyway I was enjoying it more than I expected even though some of the scenes and acting are frankly rubbish. I got to the scene where gary oldman takes delivery of the case and at the very end of the scene/chapter and the next chapter there is a pretty awful layer change on my ebench player. I'm guessing not only is there the layer change but the ebench player is struggling to read the disc too. Hence a long layer change transistion of about 10 seconds with the very end of chapter 9's last 2 seconds taking about 6 seconds on screen as a sequence of still frames.

So checking other dvd players to see how they compared I got the following results;

Ebench: 10 seconds approx
Samsung HTDM150: About 1/7th second (almost instant slight frame pause)
Kiss DP-450: 1/4 second (noticable but instant)
Prism DV-302: none
Philips 755 VCR/DVD: none
Sharp DV-740H: none
Playstation 2: 1/2 second
Xbox: none

Not a great result for the ebench player thats for sure. I've not come across anything else giving the same results on the ebench. The dvd loader fitted as I originally feared seems to be the same or very similar to the poor unit fitted in the Toshiba 330. The ebench player has a Sanyo branded loader which seems to have an identical look and eject mechanism to the Toshiba 330. Certainly its performance is the same. Great with cds, ok with most copied dvd media but slow and prone to reading problems near the end of the disc. I.e. just before the layer change and at the end of the film very occasionally.

These sanyo dvd loaders are an attempt I believe by the japanese firm to make a super low cost dvd loader for budget dvd players. They are slow and simplistic. Don't seem to have any cache and to be honest are poor in comparision to most chinese designed loaders.

If anyone ever opens their Toshiba 330 I'd be interested to know if they contain a Sanyo 1x (or possibly 2x) dvd drive mechanism like this.

However I've watched about 50 dvds on the ebench player since getting it. Admittingly about a third of these would be single layer but even so the other 30 or so have not played up on the ebench player although slight layer change pauses were obvious on many films.

Just to confirm the weakness of the sanyo design it is hopeless at picture search at anything above 2x and seek times are poor. The settling in period from hitting play to continuing playback after picture search is quite long too.