It is unfortunate.  I'll take it how it is, but I don't like it.  Is it only $50 added to avoid china?

My $.02 after working for a small startup developing custom hardware:

Other people have mentioned it, but a portable DVD player is typically going to lack a touchscreen LCD, a network interface, any significant amount of memory, and a general purpose embedded processor (why bother with general purpose when you can get a specialized DSP that costs significantly less)?  It does have some other components that the chumby lacks, but these are commodity parts.  Considering a DVD burner is about $30 on newegg, you do the math: the hardware for a DVD drive costs close to nothing these days.

But that's actually not the real issue.  The real issue is economy of scale.  When Sony makes a DVD player, they're going to get radically different pricing on parts than a startup will get. (check out TI pricing for DSPs if you're ordering a thousand chips verses a million--it's a whole new ballgame)  They can leverage manufacturing capabilities that a startup company can only dream of having at their disposal, which cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to implement.  Simply put, comparing a chumby to commodity hardware is a completely unfair comparison.  I think the people who own this company have a lot of room to cut costs, but the harsh reality of designing custom hardware for many startups is they cannot leverage economy of scale or manufacturing resources that are at the disposal of a company like Sony or Apple or Dell.  This often leads to consumers with sticker shock, but that's how "consumer" electronics reach consumer markets: economy of scale.

Hey now, I picked up a darn good Internet radio for $60.

Okay, it was from CompUSA as they were shutting the doors for good.

And all it does is be an Internet radio.

And the screen is two lines of text.

And the battery door doesn't stay shut, but I can't return it. (See 3 bullets up.)

I love my Chumby.

I would have bought one of those at the drop of a hat!!
INternet radios are cool no matter what form thay take.
Yaesumofop

The internal HW H.263 decoder in the MX21 is basically undocumented.  All we can get is a license to use some closed black-box software that we'd have to link against anything that wanted to play the video.  From talking to some people that have actually done so, it turns out it will only decode video encoded with *very* specific settings, not just any video you might find around the 'net.