Audio/Video nerd Lorin over at geeks with blogs bought himself a fancy new Toshiba HD-DVD player and prompty dismantled it without even plugging it into a TV. Even though we question his priorities, we do salute his DIY-ness in exposing the guts of the machine for all the internet to see.

The most interesting find is that the OS is stored on one 256 meg NAND flash memory device and is based off Red Hat Linux. Lorin also thought it may be possible to plug the disk into a USB-connected hard disk and boot from it, but never got around to doing it himself (slacker).

Also confirmed were the rumors that the unit uses a 2.5 Ghz Pentium 4 and a gig of PC2700 RAM. Looks like Toshiba is rehashing the strategy Microsoft used with the original Xbox and using off the shelf components to get to market faster.

Up close and personal with Toshiba's new HD DVD player [Lorin Thwaits]

Send an email to Jason Chen, the author of this post, at jchen@gizmodo.com.