Philips DVP642 DivX-Certified Progressive-Scan DVD Player
Not all audio codecs will play back with DivX video
It's great to have an inexpensive set-top box that will play DivX video. A cautionary note: Be careful which audio codec is used for the DivX video files. MP3 seems to play OK, but I found that DivX files I had, with audio encoded in Intel dvi_adpcm (0x0011) (the default for Showshifter, I think), played silently. The file audio must be converted to MP3 before burning to a disk. I understand that a firmware update may be available for the unit, but I haven't tried it yet.<br />The main detraction is that the remote control is just plain bad! I have to keep pressing buttons repeatedly to get the unit to respond. A programmable remote might improve this, but it could be the receiver on the unit that is the problem.<br />Sometimes the unit would get confused if I loaded a CD-R music disk, but this can be corrected by opening and closing the disk tray. <br />Just to see what would happen, I loaded a CD-R with only some RealMedia (.rm) files. The player became confused and kept trying to load the disk. I could not eject the disk until I finally turned it off and held down the eject button when powering back on. That got it to eject.<br />The file menu interface is very primitive.<br />Playback of DivX 5.05 video encoded at 800kbs played with &quot;reasonable&quot; quality. Sometimes it looked like the characters on TV were walking through some kind of clear gelatinous ooze but mainly if you are watching up close. This can be alleviated somewhat by the menu ajustments for picture quality for selecting a less bright picture.<br />I just used a regular TV. No Progressive scan HDTV montior to test. DVD playback quality seemed fine but using the crumby remote to navigate menus is a big detraction. It played my DVD+R and DVD+RW disks with no problem, although there is no mention of support for the DVD-R/W disks and I have read elsewhere that they do not play on this unit. That is unfortunate for the early adopters the spent a lot of money on DVD-R/W disks before the DVD+R/W format (a better format IMHO) became available.<br />There is a back-door hack on the remote to change the region code to make it region free (videohelp.com) but even BETTER is that there seems to be NO Macrovision on the unit, right out of the box!!! I ran it through a VCR and the image appears stable! This is great because if your TV doesn't have video inputs, you can plug the player into the VCR inputs and don't have to buy an expensive RF modulator and constantly swap cables between the VCR and the DVD/RF modulator. (Macrovision should be outlawed!!!)