What is inside a DVD player? (1 of 5)

- [Voiceover] All right, today we're gonna take a look at this DVD player. We're gonna see what's inside it and what makes it work. There are several key components to this. We'll be looking at the power supply, the control board and the CD tray, as well as the laser itself and the external housing. So let's go ahead and get started. This DVD player is actually very low cost. You can buy it for less than $30 and the way they've been able to reduce the cost, part of it is that the actual chips inside it needed to make it run have come down in price, and part of it is that they've been able to simplify the components on the board tremendously. There we go. All right, you can take a look at the insides there. This piece of metal is, again, was just a flat sheet, was run through a press which created these tabs here and the tabs lock in the housing under the front part. It also had these indentations stamped in it so the screws would sit flush. And then the holes were punched in it and it was folded. Okay, so you can see inside the DVD player here. I do have it plugged in. Never safe to plug in an electronic device when it is open. So, do not try this at home unless you have a professional with you. But I did want to show you what happens when the DVD or the CD gets pulled into the player and kind of how it works. So what's gonna happen is the tray's gonna come in, and you'll see this back plate here lowered down to make room for that tray, and then you'll see it spool up. Then the laser will move across, or, the laser assembly will start sliding across the DVD and you'll see that happen here. So, you can see the power's on, the LED indicator's here. I'm gonna go ahead and close the tray to bring it in and then press play, and you can see it spool up there, and what's happening is power's being fed from this board here all the way over to the control board and then the control board is telling the motors what to do and gathering information from the laser. And then it's sending it to these ports here, which go out to your TV and show up as a signal. We're going to try and remove the front panel of this unit. There we go. All right. So the front panel basically is an injection molded plastic piece. It houses the slot through which the CD tray comes out of. It also houses a window that the infrared from the remote control can penetrate to tell the thing what to do. And it has another little spot for an LED that indicates whether the device on and, or whether it's turned off. And then on the top, there are a number of different buttons. Those buttons are separate pieces molded in there. There's an eject button, a play/pause, a stop and a power button, so fairly simple design. And this piece is probably made out of ABS plastic. I don't see an ABS mark on it. It has these tabs, which snap into the rest of the frame and make it easy to attach, and fairly low cost there.