Well, will you look this? Isn’t that a sight for sore eyes?
Forget Yahoo the web portal, forget Yahoo the e-mail service, forget Yahoo the company that just bought Tumblr: Back in 2005, there was a Yahoo DVD player.
As CNET’s John Falcone tweets:
Yes, John Falcone. Yes, I do. But it’s been… oh, eight years since I’ve thought about it. Man, what a gem.
Now, this was no ordinary DVD player. Well, it was sort of ordinary in its functionality, but it sure didn’t look like ordinary DVD players. Yahoo’s YDP-530 had two superfluous analog meters flanking the disc tray; one measured audio volume, its needle bouncing back and forth as dialogue ebbed and flowed. The other supposedly measured the bit rate of the video being played as it made its way from the DVD player to your TV set.
To say that CNET’s 2005 review of the YDP-530 is interesting doesn’t do it justice. This quip, for instance, is marvelous:
Facing pressure from Google on the search, maps, and e-mail front, Yahoo has decided to strike back with…a DVD player? While the $100 YDP-530 bears the Yahoo brand, it’s actually manufactured by Diamond Electronics, a company that, as its press release states, “supplied the DVD player that Forbes Magazine (September 2003) referenced as Wal-Mart de Mexico’s single largest dollar volume product in the entire country.”
As for those cool analog meters?
[W]hile they look pretty nifty and even light up, we can’t really imagine any practical purpose for them. Unfortunately for the geek who wants to know how many bits that last chase sequence averaged, the bit-rate meter is wildly inaccurate; it kind of just bounces up and down, even on still images. Standard OSD meters are much better for actually showing video bit rates.
Do yourself a favor and read the entire review. It’s not long. The video embedded at the top of it shows off those funky meters, too.
Yahoo YDP-530 Review [CNET]