Philips DVP642 DivX-Certified Progressive-Scan DVD Player
Great buy
I must be stupid, because I can't seem to train my cat to change out DVDs, which is something everybody here complaining about the lack of an eject button _on the remote_ must have done. Question: Who cares if the remote doesn't have an eject button? You have to get off your duff to swap discs anyway.    But, seriously, on to the review. I've tried in this player DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD+R bootyped as -ROM, CD-R, and CD-RW. All worked.    In regards to formats, I've tried vcd,svcd,mpeg,avi,dvd video, DivX, Xvid. I'm not 100% positive that last one was in fact a true Xvid, but pretty sure. Of the DivX I've done two channel and digital surround. All worked with the exception of two of the PC's formats: one, encoded with 2-channel sound, did not play sound, and one played, but its video was funkily downgraded to 256 colors or something and all blocky. This is out of trying probably 15 movies (old and new). My guess is that those that didn't work were just encoded badly, so it was not the player's fault.    I have a poorly burned DVD movie on a disk that was very jumpy on my 9 month old koss player, and in such bad shape that my nec 3500 burner would not even rip from it (I wanted to rebuild it), no matter what I did. I was going to use it as a frisbee. However, this Philips player played it and there was zero sign of stuttering.    Three complaints I have about this are:    1) X8 is the fastest FF. In reality it seems to go faster, ie. it does not take fully 10 seconds to get through 80 seconds of footage. Still, I don't know why they had it go so slowly.    2) Seems that pressing display is temporary. I can't leave it on to see the time on the disk if I'm forward winding through it. You can see the time on disk on the display on the player, but that's still a bit silly.    3) Remember disks...if you press stop, you can resume later. However, if you take out the disk and put it back in, the player will lose where it was. My old cheapy 9 month old Koss (mentioned above), would remember disks. In fact you could watch disk 1 half way through, watch disk 2, then it would resume disk 1's spot. This player is supposed to remember as far back as 5 disks, but mine doesn't.    All in all a great deal though, especially at Amazon's prices. Not spending the 1-2 hours required to convert a DivX into DVD format is _very_ convenient. If I wasn't so cheap, I'd buy a second one.