Overheating DVD Player

 

I recently bought a Sainsbury’s RED HDMI DVD Player Model no 585 408 from a car boot sale, very cheap.  This DVD Player was cheap anyway when new, it’s Sainsbury’s own cheap brand, it’s a very generic Chinese player.  My reason for buying it was to see what it looked like on my new TV using the HDMI inputs, my existing DVD player was connected by scart and didn’t look as good as I’d like.

Initial results were promising, it looked very crisp and clear, but after 10 minutes of playing a disk, it stopped and wouldn’t respond to the remote.  Switching it off fixed it for a while, then it’d lock up again.

 

Thinking I’d found the reason it was being sold cheap at a car boot sale, I thought I’d open it up to have a look inside.  Hoping it was a simple power supply problem I guess.  Indeed, on opening it, I thought the PSU looked nasty, so I cut the cable, and connected it instead to a PC power supply.  The player wanted +5v and +12v, so this was easy enough to arrange.

 

It still crashed, though would run for a bit longer before doing so.

 

The problem turned out to be the processor. Marked MTK1389, it was scorchingly hot, around 60C after just a few minutes, and when it’d been running for a while, it was too hot to comfortably touch.

My solution was simple – I stuck a heatsink on it, from an old PC.  The player now works wonderfully, and hasn’t crashed or locked up since.  I’m very pleased with the picture quality too.

I don’t know if all these models run hot – I opened up a different cheap DVD player, and found a similar processor, though with a different package, and whilst it got warm, it wasn’t anything like as hot as the Sainsbury’s player.

So, is it a design fault, or some curious fault on this particular player?  I’ve no idea, but if you’ve a DVD player that plays for a while then stops, here’s what I did to fix mine. Perhaps It’ll work for you!

 

This is the inside of the player. The lid opened simply by undoing all the screws in the base that were marked with an arrow.  The circuit board in the middle is the main board with the overheating processor, on the right is the PSU board.  Make sure the DVD player is unplugged before opening it up, there’s live mains voltage on the PSU board – keep away!

 

This is a close up of the processor, in this case it’s a MT1389QE.  I carefully wiped the top of it with a cloth that I’d dipped in some Isopropyl Alcohol, to clean and degrease it.

I then got myself a heatsink.  This came from an old PC, and was stuck on the motherboard chipset – it’s not a PC CPU heatsink as I found they were too big.  I prised it off the PC motherboard chipset with a flat bladed screwdriver, and scraped the adhesive from it with a sharp knife and patience! This heatsink was a bit too big. I measured the DVD player CPU, then used a hacksaw to trim a little off one side of the heatsink.  I then cleaned it with soapy water, and degreased the underneath with Isopropyl Alcohol.

 

I then got some heatsink paste. This is Arctic Cooling MX-2, designed for PC CPUs. I squirted a little on the top of the DVD CPU and smeared it evenly across the whole of the surface with a piece of plastic – you could use the edge of an old credit card, or a stiff bit of cardboard.

 

This is the heatsink stuck in place. Note the connector on the immediate right of the CPU – be careful not to short the pins of this with your heatsink.  I then left it for a few hours to set.

This is the DVD player later, after being left playing a DVD for about 35 minutes. (The meter is showing degrees Celcius). I couldn’t get the temperature to rise above 42C, a significant drop from the 60C+ that I was seeing within 10 minutes previously.

 

I reassembled the case, and the player has worked without fault ever since!

 

I hope this is of help to someone, I suspect that this fix might be of benefit to other modern home entertainment devices, such as Freeview or Satellite receivers that tend to start playing up after they’ve been switched on for a little while.  Let me know!