Two weeks ago, we were watching a nice DVD my girlfriend and I, when suddenly, a terrible noise and a flash occurred, followed by a total blackout…

I first thought: “oh my god, my TV just exploded!”. But after having put the breaker back on, I realized it wasn’t my TV the faulty part, but my cheap DVD player. I could even see some smoke going out of the poor guy… Since it wasn’t pretty new nor expensive, I wasn’t more worried about the player than the DVD inside!

A screwdriver helped me to get the disc out of the dead player, and it was playing back some minutes after in my laptop… no way we had to miss the end of the movie!

Nevertheless, the laptop was only a backup solution, and I recently bought a new (and cheap – 40€) DVD player to replace the broken one. I got one featuring USB and SD inputs (very nice to put an external drive and read from it) and HDMI output (not really necessary since my TV isn’t HD at all… but hey, why spitting on it?). And of course it reads plenty of formats. Here is the new beast: