Xtrons HD101T teardown

I purchased two of these units through ebay. Although they do work out of the box I wanted to see what was inside because they aren’t perfect.

Inside they look like this:

The main components are:

Problems or Complaints

Audio from speaker is bad. The speaker faces out the back so it is blasting the person’s ears sitting in the front seat to wich the device is attached to their headrest.
Hard to get a disk out because there is a clamshell door on the back where there is the mounting bracket.
Doesn’t resume at power-on.
FM modulator is junk. There are only 8 freq. to choose and around here they are in use. Also the output volume level is way too low through the FM.
The DVD drive motor is brushed, so it isn’t going to last very long.

What it does OK

Plays movies off a thumb drive. I have a collection encoded as medium bit rate DIVX for an in dash JVC that is also very picky and this unit plays the same files just fine.
Has free video games.
Mounts well to the seat.
Doesn’t look expensive or that good, so hopefully no one breaks my window just to steal a $100 video player.

Ideas

Internally I replaced the 8 ohm with a 4 ohm speaker. The output is louder and my speaker is external so I can aim it at the person watching the screen.
Find and mod the FM transmitter. I believe it is the small board soldered near the corner.

Wish I had more time to hack.

Curt Meyers