Cyber Home AD-L 528

This page is about our first DVD player, a Cyber Home AD-L 528.

We had barely moved into our new place when the old VCR accidentally "fell under my feet". So we went out and got a new one. That was the last VCR we ever bought because we also used the opportunity to buy one of them new DVD player gadgets. This made sense because viewing the DVDs that I had already bought on a PC wasn't quite the real thing. And the name sounded cool!

The beast was purchased on 17-10-2001 for the stately sum of 299.00 Deutschmarks.

Hooked up to our old JVC 51cm tube TV and a Sharp CD-C690X it gave us a few years of service doing what it's supposed to do: play DVDs. Like all decent DVD players it also supported MP3 discs and VCDs -- you know, the kind where you might find the audience walking in front of the camera.

Later on it was made region-free -- a useful feature if you have a few American friends.

User Manual: English | German | Large views: True model number | Connectivity | Box

This unit also has the distinct honour of being the first device to play "content" that actually managed to damage connected hardware!

What happened in 2005 was that I was authoring a bunch of MPEG photo slide shows onto VCD via PC. I don't remember what software was used for the project but it wasn't a pleasure to use.

When I finally got to test view one of the resulting discs in this player, there was a loud buzz and after a bang the TV went dark. When I switched it off and on again I saw that some of the top lines of the screen had frizzled! They were dead, of the first 20 lines or so only every alternate line was lit. I've never seen anything like this before!

For letterboxed movies this wasn't an issue, with regular 4:3 TV broadcasts it became a nuisance.

Sometime around 2006 the player started acting erratically and was replaced by a Muvid 209 unit.

It sat in storage for a few years until Christmas 2016 when I decided to give it one more spin. The tray didn't open, so I had a look inside.

The first thing to notice is that the device is solid. The box is certainly very roomy.

The second thing to notice is that the drive itself is powered via a Molex connector and connected via a standard 40-pin IDE/PATA ribbon cable! A closer look revealed that it's an ordinary DVD-ROM drive (CyberDrive DM126D) like you could find in a regular PC.

Had I known this earlier I might have even replaced/repaired the drive but sorry, I have no use for this beast of an old DVD player that can potentially destroy TV sets. Off to the trash you go!