Philips DVP642 DivX-Certified Progressive-Scan DVD Player
Almost perfect, but not quite
I just got this DVD player a few days ago and have been playing with to see what works and what doesn't.  The best thing about this player is probably the 8x fast forwarding in divx mode, which works great.  Though Philips says that it plays everything, that's technically not true.  It does play just about everything without a hitch, even some very old Divx3 stuff, but the problem comes with the Xvid.  Even though officially, Xvid is not support fully, but as of the last firmware upgrade only versions of Xvid before version 1.0 was supported.  This comes as a rather strange twist for me, since Xvid 1.0 was released in Dex. 2003.  So pretty much everything I created in Xvid for the last 6 months is unplayable, unless I re-encode them.  However, for the majority of people who use Divx5, there's really nothing to worry about. <br /> <br />As for disc compatibility, though the instruction manual, as far as I can tell, does not say it supports DVD-R, but it does.  However, it chokes on multi-session data DVD-Rs even if they are closed.  Not sure if its the same with +Rs.  The player was only able to read the first session on all my multisession DVDs.  Maybe I need to play with the way I burn tem.  Also, the system also has very bad support for long file names.  Only the first 11 characters of the file name will be shown in the menu, which is a major disappointment considering the Lite-on LVD-2001 did much better than that. <br /> <br />All in all, its a great player that plays almost everything, not to mention looking very good.  At its price range, there's really no complaint, but it really is almost perfect, but not quite.