Day 24: K|I|S|S

DVD players: love them or hate them, they allow you to watch a dvd on them; provided you also have a telly.

Don't you just hate it when people use the old "love them or hate them they are here to stay" type rubbish. I know I do.

Anyway the real point behind this posting is that a couple of weeks ago I ordered a new DVD player because the one that I currently have in my Scottish retreat won't play my dvds that I have recorded at home on my Toshiba RD-XS30. First off I went to Asda to see if I could get one for £39 that would play these dvds, but all their cheapo ones didn't mention what formats they would play. The only ones that said they would play dvd+-r or dvd+-rw where in the £79 to £99 price range. So I then thought of the fact that Al had bought a K|I|S|S dvd player (with integral hard drive and ethernet connectivity) and that these are meant to be able to play all dvd formats plus DIVX and just about anything else you can throw at it (and it is also Scandinavian). I didn't need the hard disk or networky stuff so I thought I'd see what their bottom of therange players looked like. I initially spotted the DP-450 which looked good, but then I spotted the smaller (and cheaper) DP-1000 that has the added bonus of easily being made region free. So, the DP-1000 it was to be then and it arrived yesterday. When I got home I resisted the temptation of plugging it straight in and thought I woulf get a shower, then do my ironing while watching Corrie and then I would plug it in and celebrate the new dvd player by having a chicken fried rice. Or so I thought. I plugged the dvd player in, and after a few seconds the front panel screen spoted the slogan "BOOT ERR". Oh dear. I powered off and on, but still the same. I even tried putting a dvd in and powering off and on, but still the ubiquitous BOOT ERR message. If only I had an internet connection in my house in Scotland, I could have downloaded a copy of the latest DP-1000 firmware and tried to load it to see if it would fix the problem. But then I thought I have an internet connection at work, so it was straight into the car and back into work to see what I could find. I spent the next hour scanning the kiss website and the kiss newsgroup (and no I can't be bothered to put links in just now). I ended up downloading the latest DP-1000 firmware (version 2.8.5) onto my laptop and went back home. My laptop happens to be a Mac and on the kiss website it only gave instructions for creating the firmware cd using Roxios's toast software (yes I know I could have put a link in here too) and I haven't got that. So, when I got home I tried creating a couple of cds in various ways, but each time I tried to download the firmware to the player I just got the old BOOT ERR. Oh well, it was now too late to watch a dvd anyway so I would just have to send it back to the supplier the next day. When I got to work I first sent kiss an email to see if they could come up with any sugestion before I rang up the supplier. They suggested uploading the firmware and it that didn't work i would have to send it back. SO due to my lack of success at creating a valid firmware cd on the mac we deiced to make use of Paolo's laptop for firmware creation duties. The email from kiss mentioned firmware version 2.8.4, but we knew that wasn't the most upto date so we downloaded and burnt version 2.8.5. We inserted it in the drive, connected the dvd to one of the televisions along the front wall at work and lo and behold we got the firmwar update screen. We pressed the enter button and it immediately came back with "update complete" and spat the disk out. Great! I thought. But, on powering off anf on we were straight back to the BOOT ERR message. So I rang the supplier and and they said they would send a courier round for it that very afternoon and I could expect it back in 5 to 7 days. Meanwhile Al suggested "Why don't we try and earlier firmware upgrade?" and I thought "Well Kiss did say to use 2.8.4, so now Paolo was straight on the case and a 2.8.4 cd was in the drive and waiting for me to press enter. I click later and the firmware starts uploading. This time it takes longer and after the old pwer off power on we have a live and working DP-1000. So I rang up the suppliers and cancelled the courier and we then had another go at loding in 2.8.5 and it went like a dream. Thanks to Al and Paolo for their assistance.
The morals of the story are as follows:
1. If I had bought a normal DVD player and it was broken I would have had to have returned it.
2. Scandinavian stuff is brill.