Although the Sega Dreamcast had many good qualities that made it beloved by the thousands of people who bought the console, one glaring omission was the lack of DVD video capabilities. Despite its optical drive being theoretically capable of such a feat, Sega had opted to use the GD-ROM disc format to not have to cough up DVD licensing fees, while the PlayStation 2 could play DVD movies. Fortunately it’s possible to hack DVD capability into the Dreamcast if you aren’t too fussy about the details, as [Throaty Mumbo] recently demonstrated.
For the Tl;dw folk among us, there’s a GitHub repository that contains the basic summary and all needed files. Suffice it to say that it is a bit of a kludge, but on the bright side it does not require one to modify the Dreamcast. Instead it uses a Pico 2 board that emulates a Sega DreamEye camera on the Dreamcast’s Maple bus via the controller port. The Dreamcast then requests image data as if from said camera.
On the DVD side of things there’s a Raspberry Pi 5 that connects to an external USB DVD drive and which encodes the video for transmission via USB to the Pico 2 board. Although somewhat sketchy, it totally serves to get DVDs playing on the Dreamcast. If only Sega had not skimped on those license fees, perhaps.
With all that support hardware, what’s the Dreamcast actually doing that’s relevant?
It’s not at all playing any DVD for sure.
AFAICT it only plays the video stream from a faked webcam…
I mean it’s a hacky hack – no doubt about that but the title is a lie. Assuming the webcam doesn’t stream mpeg2(?) the Dreamcast isn’t even decoding the video from the DVD.
Yeah…. “totally” on opposite day.
“the title is a lie”
To be fair to the HaD author, the Youtube video title is a lie.
“AFAICT it only plays the video stream”
I agree, I’d even say that it doesn’t “play” it but barely “renders” the stream. With the same logic, you can probably get a Tamagotchi to “play” a BluRay disc.
So if you are wondering “can you really play a DVD in a DC”, as in put a DVD in the DC player and get it to play, then no.
“I agree, I’d even say that it doesn’t “play” it but barely “renders” the stream. With the same logic, you can probably get a Tamagotchi to “play” a BluRay disc.”
But you agree that it’s a real, unadulterated hack, right?
Little more “hack” than just pointing an OG DreamEye camera on any kind of thing that plays and displays a DVD’s content.
So yeah, the part of “emulating” a DreamEye camera is a hack. The DVD playing part isn’t.
It’s like saying an old tape player can stream Spotify just because you used one of those audio-signal-2-cassette adapters in the tape player and attached whatever to do the actual receiving+playing of a Spotify stream.
The adapter cassette is the hack – or would be if you couldn’t buy them of the shelf.
Maybe you didn’t notice, but HaD has been known for stuff like this since day one.. Tons of projects where people just gutted enclosures and put proto boards in with some form of copy-paste or primitive functionality.. To the point that they have to make most featured content from said projects do to pure lack of options..
I actually remember being called a “troll” dozens of times for being critical of it over the years.. Hot gluing Pi boards in enclosures and throwing away original PCB is about as all-for-SEO as it gets..
These things also good for audio DVDs?
I seem to remember something similar
It plays VCDs and Karaoke disks with the addition of a IR remote and dongle
PS3 should be able to play DVD-Audio discs… with a hack, but that never materialized.
https://ps3sacd.com/faq.html#_Toc177216817
Chalking the Dreamcast’s lack of DVD capability up to an unwillingness to pay “Licensing fees” is at best a serious oversimplification. DVD drive hardware was also still fairly new and expensive when the Dreamcast was designed. In contrast, the Dreamcast’s “GD-ROM” format and drive leveraged Yamaha’s existing CD-ROM hardware and production lines to create something akin to a “double density” CD format.
Another perceived benefit from SEGA’s perspective was that unlike CD and DVD, the format was proprietary, so they could tout it to developers as being much more secure against piracy… up until they actually released the thing, and people quickly discovered the security exploits that allowed it to boot games off of ordinary CD-Rs.
Being the first mover of this console generation also hurt SEGA, I think – they (and Nintendo) also underestimated just how much people would prefer a console that doubled as a DVD player, as the success of the Playstation 2 cannot be understated. But they were working against the reality that Sony could manufacture its own DVD drives and had the willingness to take an even bigger loss on every PS2 they sold in order to dominate the market and recoup it all in game royalties.
Long ago, I was developing software for CD-i. Really capable hardware in its time, for some things, really crippled for other things. For instance, no hardware acceleration, nothing of that, not even sprites (although I think the mouse cursor was a hardware cursor, I don’t remember anymore). Even though it was basically faster than the Amiga, it was impossible to match the Amiga quality video games. And there were no inputs for proper joysticks/controls either. The video chip was great in itself, but WHY no Blitter???
But the CD-i also had an extensive expansion port (used by the Digital Video cartridge). This port included an RGB (or maybe YUV) video input, which would then be shown on a background plane (CD-i had two graphics planes and an external input plane that could be mixed, I think it was more sophisticated than simple genlock).
So I had the idea of making an extension card that could plug into the DV slot, which would have its own video chip with hardware acceleration and some connectors for keyboard/joystick/mouse. That would make some great games possible, imagine how much data you could store in 650MB of (cd-)rom storage!
This was before Sony made the PSX, of course.
But I wasn’t knowledgable enough to do it. And even if I would have been able to design, build and produce, the expansion card, who would invest in making games for it? I did not have the organizational skills.
In any case, 1 or 2 years later, Sony’s PSX came out, and that basically killed the idea. But not only that, it killed the whole CD-i market with it.
It was so sad. Philips could have easily made such a card, it was not rocket science. And if they would have used an off-the-shelf video chip (e.g. the TMS34010), people would already have known how to use it. It would have cost a fraction of what the DV cartridge cost, and everyone would have bought one, provided that there would have been games.
I’m just writing this down because it’s a kind of similar situation with Sega’s Dreamcast here. The manufacturer made a few short-sighted decisions and were done for soon after.