fireman_mike

Hope someone can help with these...

1. From what I can gather, the EU COMAND heads are different spec to the US ones; they have a movie DVD player as standard, and can be 'tweaked' to play a DVD while the vehicle is moving. How about fitting such a head to a US car? Big job? Easy job? Impossible job?

2. The US head units which *do* have a DVD player for the nav. system... is it possible to tweak those so they play normal movie DVDs?

3. 2009 models get a new COMAND head with hard disk based nav, and better ipod integration(?), I believe. Is it known if they're backwards-compatible with older cars, i.e. you could put an 09 head in an 06 or 07 R-Class?

4. Does anyone know the raw native resolution of the COMAND LCD screen, in pixels?

Thanks!

Mike

lkchris

Be sure to inform your insurance company when you achieve the ability to watch movies at your dashboard.

You can surely put the new unit in an older car but of course there aren't going to be many in junkyards and new ones are $7000.

fireman_mike

Well the movie-watching is for the front passenger, or indeed for both of us when the vehicle is stationary. I don't see it having any relvance to the insurance company.

And $7k? That's almost a third of the value of my car! I guess that's MBs way of saying 'forget it'!

Still interested in the possibility of the EU unit...

Thanks anyway

Mike

rob13572468

1. euro ML/GL/R up to 2008 do not have a built in DVD but they do have a video input present that allowed front viewing of a seperate TV/DVD system. If you had the system present you could then get a module that allowed the system to be viewed while in motion. moving a euro command to a US car *is* plug and play but you lose nav capability for the US. you would also then need the tv/dvd system as well. also its PAL so you would need to version code the system to play NTSC region 1 DVD's

2. US ML/GL/R have a DVD drive present if they have the nav option but the nav drive lacks the video decoding chip so it cannot be converted to play dvd video.

3. 2009 ML/GL/R command (NTG 2.5) is not backward compatible but can be retrofitted. The difference is that for 2009 VCS and telephone are built in whereas for 2008 and earlier they are seperate units. thus a special harness is needed to bring the inputs from the seperate module to the front unit. As quoted the new commands are quite expensive right now and therefore not practical.

4. native resolution is 800 x 600 for the command LCD.


There are two ways to have video on your ML/GL/R command. the easiest is if you already have rear cam then we sell a module for $599 that adds on-demand video input to the command. you push a button on the steering wheel and the screen switches to the video input. If you do not have rear cam then you can have an RGB interface installed for about $800 which will also give you video inputs as well as rear cam inputs. Then you just add a video source like a DVD in the glovebox and you are good to go...