Possible To Play Dvd?

[Nicola777]

hi all,

it may be a stupid question but does anyone know if it is possible to play dvd movie in the b9010 sat nav unit?

The screen is big enough and this option will be very nice, if it was possible of course!

See you

[bothwell_buyer]

Hi

Not a stupid question....but looks like a difficult one!

I can't help as my mains lead isn't long enough to reach the car and DVD player!

[anchorman]

I think its been broached before. You need shcm or JHRC for this one. If they don't look in try sending them a pm.

[shcm]

Short answer - I'll stick my neck out and say it's unlikely it can be done (and then someone will show me evidence it can ).

Longer answer -

As a lot of people know from playing around with home movies, ripping DVDs etc - the video and audio exists on the DVD, usually in something called mpeg2 format, which is compressed (a bit like a zip file if you like - but zipping doesn't loose any information, where mpeg2 throws away stuff you'll never notice is missing - much like mp3 format does). For the pedantic, there's container formats and codecs blah, blah, but if I go into that I'll be here all night and half of tomorrow.

The stuff has to be decompressed before it can be shown. Now, I haven't sat down and worked it out, but if the decompression is done in software, I expect it needs a pentium type processor running in the region of 600-800MHz minimum. That kind of processor is relatively rare in automotive ECUs at the moment (although I've worked on a prototype vision system that tried to use a 400MHz processor). I think it is unlikely that the sat nav will have a processor fast enough to do the decompression, although, it's not unknown for the faster auto processors to be in things like sat navs.

Dedicated chips (hardware) exist to decompress/decode such stuff (there's probably one in your home DVD player), which therefore won't need such a high powered processor. Some computer motherboards also have dedicated decompression hardware (mine has some), to take the processing load away from the processor. I think it is unlikely Toyota would have included such a hardware chip in the sat nav. Maybe one day I'll take it apart and look.

I think one approach Toyota has used in other markets, it to use a separate DVD changer, which the sat nav/head unit can talk to and be used to play the video.

So my reasoning is I expect it is very unlikely, but who knows...............

[Mc Tavish]

Hi Nicola777 i had a XT5 with the sat nav in dash (if thats the one you are talking about) and quick answer is NO because i was like you and thought in dash screen ..... dvd rom disc for sat nav .....dvd film....???? sat nav doesn't read disc and dosen't like anything other than the correct disc put in it as i had a 10 min panic attack when the sat nav decided to keep disc AAAARRRRGH!!!!!! it eventualy decided it had already seen the film and gave me it back save youself the bother don't even try

McTavish

[Dutchrav]

A company called Rheinaudio in Germany sells audio/video converters for the touchscreen units.

www.rheinaudio.info (not much info)

http://cgi.ebay.at/Toyota-Navi-Multimedia-...6QQcmdZViewItem

[Nicola777]

The question actually was about after been in a Lexus, IS 220 D, which of course don't have the same unit but the functions are more or less the same, just more than mine eheh, so i though that those unit are possibly almost the same but just in mine some functions are just hidden or maybe some how locked..

Anyway the touch screen is the same and in his case he have got a rear view camera, then i really though about more possibility for mine as people was asking how to plug a camera for that purpose.

Then as you know it's only a software codec and presence or not of the player.

The DVD unit as it read dvd maps should be able to read any DVD, just the software can't.

Thanks for your kind answer