Philips DVP642 DivX-Certified Progressive-Scan DVD Player
good, but not great
I have had mine for about a year now, and it still works, which is more than one can say of the cheapy DVD players. But it does not work perfectly.  The first one I got had a bad habit of turning off erratically when I pressed the play button on the remote after certain other key combinations. I called customer service, and they were completely baffled. So I returned it and got another one, which did the same thing, but at least a less often. So I kept it.  The remote is small and the keys, while slightly different in shape for different functions, are lined up in neat rows and columns, and are difficult to memorize. The keys perform significantly different functions in different modes, such as DVD vs JPEG. And once you go into zoom, you lose some key functions entirely, such as slow motion. The zoom is useful for watching letter box movies, so this is not good.  Sound from the CD function is disappointingly mediocre, not good enough for feeding into my sound system.  As to playing everything you can throw at it, this is an overstatement. First of all it does not play any Windows Media. And I have tried some compressed movie disks and it had trouble.  Another irritant is that it lacks most basic control buttons on the player, itself; you have to use the remote for almost everything. Is it asking too much to be able to skip chapters or music tracks from the player?  One plus is that it has a resume function for the last five dvds. Just press play shortly after inserting the disc and it will start up where you left off.  It also has JPGs arranged by directory, similar to an old DOS graphic user interface on a computer, and is reasonably easy to navigate.  The original claim to fame of the DVP642 was that it did not have macrovision on the video output, so you could connect it through your vhs and into the tv through the rf out. You could also copy to vhs. This of course is illegal. And reports are the new ones don't have this.  The other key asset is DIVX. But i haveyet to figure out how to make divx discs.   I would assume there are better deals out there these days.  But otherwise, it is good, with a good picture.