Not long ago, our beloved Philips DVP642 DVD player broke. We'd had it for a long time - when we bought it, it was one of the most inexpensive progressive-scan DVD players on the market. It was also one of the first to play back MPEG4/XviD/DivX video, and (a key feature for us) it can be easily converted to a region-free player, allowing us to play our European movies on the same system.

So we were pretty disappointed when, one day, it refused to turn on. The power button blinked slowly on and off, and neither the front panel nor the remote had the slightest effect. A quick Google search confirmed that this was a known problem in this model. It was caused by the failure of one of the capacitors in the player, the one marked "C316." One posting indicated that this could be confirmed by opening the player - C316 would be bulging slightly upward, and possibly leaking a tiny amount of brown fluid. Sure enough, our C316 was bulging and leaky.

But there was good news - many people had been able to repair their players by replacing the faulty capacitor with one with a higher voltage rating. C316 was rated at 10 volts, and so we apparently needed a capacitor rated at 16 volts or higher. A little soldering would fix it right up - for the cost of a new capacitor, about $1. Not too bad.

Emily picked up a 35v capacitor at Radio Shack. In the meantime, we had another problem - with the power off, we couldn't get the DVD tray open, and it had one of our discs in it. If the repair job went south, we'd need to retrieve the disc somehow, and the tray was locked tight. As it turned out, the tray could be released by prodding the unit with a paper clip in the right spot, on the underside of the player. Disc retrieved, I borrowed a soldering iron from a buddy (thanks again, John!), held my breath, and got to it. Nothing to lose, right?

This picture's a little blurry, but you can see C316 right in the middle. It's bulging and leaky:

The front and back of the circuit board, after I removed it from the case. Just three screws, one plastic pin, and four cables holding it on.

It took me forever to get the capacitor off - by the time I got one of the leads hot enough to melt the solder, the other one had cooled off. The body of the capacitor itself was too hot to touch, so I was afraid I'd damage the new one. I finally just yanked it off, leaving the leads stuck to the board. Then I removed them one at a time.

The replacement capacitor. It's quite a bit larger than the original, but it does fit.

Getting the new capacitor installed was a lot easier than removing the old one. I barely used any solder at all - I heated up each point enough to punch the lead through, and then clipped them short once I had the new capacitor seated on the board. The tricky part was not letting the solder overflow to other points on the board, which probably would have killed it dead.

Here's my messy solder job on the underside of the board. It's the two points in the middle.

So it looked bad, but…

It worked!

When I plugged the board back in and fired up the player, it worked like a charm - no problems at all. And it was incredibly satisfying to resurrect some dead hardware for $1 and half an hour of my time.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Science and technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.