Unless you are a collector, these days you probably listen to and/or consume music via streaming, or in some local format like MP3 or FLAC. The idea of voluntarily using optical solutions seems anachronistic on the surface, however, everything changes with a good dose of DIY. So we come to the YouTube channel befinitiv on YouTube, who recently shared his work on a very different portable audio player: a Blu-ray Discman.
There's no point in denying it: flash memory devoured everything in its path. A 128GB microSD card costs less than fifteen euros these days. Storage options are so cheap and abundant that even the MP3 format itself is in question. We can store hundreds of entire albums in FLAC or WAV without worries, and most importantly, without losing quality.
With that in mind, any plan to explore optical formats (and perhaps return to them) bites the dust immediately. The best CD-ROM holds barely 900 megabytes, a limit too rigid today. However, befinitiv on YouTube (whom we remember very well for his "Nokia 5110 Communicator"), decided to follow a very complex path to overcome it: create his own Blu-ray Discman.
Blu-ray Discman: We Would Have Sold Our Souls for This in 1997
befinitiv explains that the mechanism was extracted from an external Verbatim burner, and received several modifications with the help of a Dremel. The thickness of the player does not exceed 10 millimeters, and its casing holds everything needed for its operation, from the screen to the battery. Logically, this is only possible thanks to a custom PCB, but it is not limited to redirecting signals; it contains an ARM SoC that runs Linux (Buildroot, to be precise). Another notable aspect is that befinitiv did not remove the original function of the hardware, and it still works as a Blu-ray recorder.
Now, befinitiv ended up cutting some Blu-ray discs to reduce their diameter to 8 centimeters, but in practice, this is not necessary. The BD-R Mini or BD-R 60 min. discs exist, and although they are not as cheap, the 900 megabytes become 7.5 gigabytes. To finish, the entire project is open source. Links below!
