Mintek MDP-5861 5-Inch Portable DVD Player
Works Well So Far...NOT
Update:  Broke a few months ago!  Well, you all warned me.  But it was good while it lasted.<br /><br />The best thing about this player for us is its ability to play a variety of formats.  Practically any video that you can burn on your DVD burner or CD burner can be played on this thing.<br /><br />Of particular value to us is its ability to play regular DVD data disks with MPEG video files burned onto them.  This means that you can grab any .MPG file off the Internet (from sites sharing non-copyrighted material, such as indymedia.org), burn it directly to a DVD (e.g., using Nero) with no time spent transcoding data to regular DVD or VCD format, and play it on this player.  We keep it hooked permanently to our TV and use it to view all sorts of content that we download from the Internet.  In addition, we have a PC-based Video Recorder that works like a VCR and that generates .MPG files, so we just burn those to DVDs in the manner described above and play them on our regular TV.<br /><br />Not only does this player read video files burned onto standard ISO DVD+RWs, but it can also read UDF-formatted DVD+RWs.  Unfortunately, while UDF can handle files larger than 2GB, and ISO cannot, if you have a very large video file you can put it on a UDF disk but only the first part of the file will play on this player (after which it simply stops playing).  But who would have expected it to work with UDF at all?<br /><br />We have so far not had any quality issues, other than a quirk that it has of freezing up sometimes if you are fast-forwarding (using the remote control) and then go directly to play.  The way around this is to always hit pause to exit fast forwarding and then go to play.  If we follow this rule, there is never a problem.<br /><br />Sorry to hear about all of the quality issues and am running with the lid closed to save the LCD now, so thanks for the warnings.