About 9 months after I get my Pandora, I am planning on overhauling it. I would like some input on the features I was planning on adding:

CD/DVD drive (maybe blu-ray if it gets cheap enough)
USB hub
Any documented video mods
Overclock (if possible)
Cooling fans (maybe)
New wifi (for 802.11n)
Extra battery

If you have any ideas, post them here.

It was my impression that the pandora was fairly small.

Yeah, this mod will probably make it twice as big .

That seems like it could be a ridiculous task, unless it already has a usb port and you could make an app to interface with an external cd/dvd drive.

I answered in the bold.

To be honest, it sounds like you want a laptop. A CD drive is gonna eat up a TON of power, you are looking at an hour or two of battery life, tops, not even enough to watch a DVD movie. I would do the battery mod, hub mod, wifi mod, and make the case a little thicker, but keep the same basic profile. Then, you could use the extra thickness to add L2 and R2 trigger buttons. The motherboard recognizes those buttons, and there are clearly labeled pads for them, they just had to leave them out because the Pandora was not thick enough.

Yeah, sounds more like a high-end netbook...

Besides, why would you want blu-ray anyhow? The quality difference vs. DVD would not be noticeable at all on a WVGA (800x480), 480p screen.

If you have Blu-Ray at home, you likely aren't going to want to buy the same movie on DVD as well, and transcoding the videos to 800x480 could be time consuming (and illegal in the US). Only some movies come with both types of discs/dual discs.

I'm not sure if the Pandora could handle decoding Blu-Ray or not. I've seen 720p decoding using commercial codecs on the same chip that the Pandora has, so 1080i might be feasible.

Yes, but even if you can decode at 720p or 1080i, you're still displaying it on a screen that maxes out at 480p.

True, but those are optimized for playback files. Playing back from a Blu-Ray is far more intensive, much like how streaming video is more intensive than playing it back locally.

Matter of convenience, and it is higher res than 480p, just not much higher.



The overhead of playback from Blu-Ray shouldn't be that much higher than a file stored on other media. I'm guessing by streaming video, you mean web streaming like Youtube and Hulu, the reason that takes up so much more processing power is because Adobe Flash is horrible at video playback and doesn't leverage much hardware acceleration. The same video, even being streamed, played through a dedicated video player like mplayer will take up a lot fewer resources and probably play better too.

OK, quite possibly time consuming, but would consume less time than building this crazy huge list of mods. Secondly, transcoding a BluRay disc you own is perfectly legal, it's called fair use rights. Now, giving it to other people once you've transcoded it, that's illegal. Of course, anyone with half a brain knows that it's easy to give it to other people once you've cracked the CSS and transcoded it, so studios like to have you think it's illegal even to transcode it.

You've not heard of the DMCA apparently, it does make it illegal if you break the copy protection, especially for personal use in the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmca

The time factor depends on the number of discs versus construction skills for the mod.

Pandora = the crap. The good kind.

SS

It seems to be an awesome platform, pending it gets past the current stage, anyway.

It's getting past the current stage I'm a pre-orderer from the beginning