Philips DVP642 DivX-Certified Progressive-Scan DVD Player
Awesome player by itself, annoying drawbacks on older TVs
First off, there is absolutely no mono output.  You can screw around stereo reverb and whatnot, but if your TV only has one audio jack, you're going to need some external hardware to combine the channels, unless you want to hand pick hearing one channel or the other.  Every other player (and gaming system) I have experience with lets you get away with using one audio jack and setting the output settings to Mono to get full sound.  That just makes no sense to me, but I can live with it. <br /> <br />The thing that really gripes me is that, when adding DivX functionality, Philips just completely overlooked that a good majority of standard, 4:3 aspect TV sets that came out over two-three years ago like to overscan portions of the picture that a computer screen would normally display in full.  Thanks to this, DivX videos will have an invisible frame cropping off roughly 20% of the picture.  The remote gives you the ability to Zoom IN on a picture, but, surprise, surprise, no ability to Zoom OUT (which would easily correct this) <br />What does this mean?  If you plan on using this player to play videos with hardcoded (read: permanent) subtitles on a standard TV, the DivX fuction is essentially useless because you have to spend hours on end re-encoding all of your videos into standard DVD format with built-in black borders, as it's the only way to force the TV set to display the entire picture without losing the subtitles to the margins.  I found this out the hard way. <br /> <br />As others had said, this little player rocks as \\"just a DVD player,\\" but I think it still needs a lot of work with its extra functions.