Philips DVP642 DivX-Certified Progressive-Scan DVD Player
An excellent buy to play your DivX collection with ease
I purchased this DVD player a few days ago and have been nothing but pleased by its performance. It is a great deal for what you get: a stylish and attractive design, complete audio/video outputs (s-video, digital/optical audio, analog, etc.), full DVD player capabilities, and most of all, the ability to play DivX/Xvid (MPEG-4). <br />I've tested all kinds of media with this player and have been thoroughly satisfied. I viewed some high quality DivX-compressed movies on CD-R's in outstanding clarity without a hitch, played mp3 cds (not many features but OK), and watched DVDs (if you're clever you can even make the player region-free). <br />There's already a firmware upgrade for the player which expands its capabilities to support subtitle files (srt, sub, smi) alongside media files. It was a quick and easy process to upgrade the firmware, and I tested many DivX movies with subtitles and they worked fine. Hopefully in a future firmware upgrade they'll upgrade the menu system, which I found a bit clumsy.<br />I have two issues concerning the playback MPEG-4 files: occasionally, a movie file encoded with less popular audio codec (like OGG or PCM) will be silent; also, you can only rewind/fast forward at 8x and you cannot skip to a specific time in the movie.<br />Overall, this player is extremely capable and is a GREAT deal for its price. I'd strongly recommend it.