Philips DVP642 DivX-Certified Progressive-Scan DVD Player
great value
The DVP642 is a terrific value.  Nothing in its price range comes close ($65 currently).  You'd need a much more expensive and cumbersome Home Theater PC to do what this puppy does.  DVD, Divx, Xvid, mp3 etc etc...  It plays DVD-R and +R media fine.  The picture quality is superb.  I think the people who complained about picture quality do not understand that Divx movies are often encoded at very low bitrates.  This causes lots of pixel noise which has nothing to do with the player.  A poorly encoded file will look bad on any player.    [...]  It works great.  I did notice that if I fast forward and rewind consecutively back & forth during Divx playback that the player will just shut off.  It's probably a bug, some sort of fallback safety feature to keep the thing from locking up completely.  That's a minor nuisance as I rarely do that.  It's nice that the DVP642 supports jumping to arbitrary time points within a movie.  So if I've watched half of a Divx or Xvid movie one day and later want to resume from there, I just enter that point in the movie's time and it goes straight there.    The DVP642 offers great performance at a low price.  You just can't beat that. It's much easier to use than my HTPC, thank goodness.