Philips DVP642 DivX-Certified Progressive-Scan DVD Player
Well...it's a nice start...
...As in, it's a \\"nice start\\" to gearing up for multi-media/multi-format entertainment. ...But certainly not the finish line. I really wish I could say better things about this player. It was recommended to me by a co-worker who swore by it. Let's see: DivX/MPEG-4 compatibility, region-free hack...sounds good so far. Then I saw the pricetag and all critical logic went out the door. <br /> <br />So, YES, this player will work fine with your regular (commercial) DVDs--regardless of the region. The DivX compatibility, however, leaves much to be desired. We're simply not talking about a physically robust player here. You can't just whip up a CD-R or DVD-R of the flick you just downloaded and fire it up on this player. It's much more finicky than that. Any surface scratches whatsoever--no matter how minute--and you're in a world of hurt. The skipping will drive you up a wall soon enough. <br /> <br />Further, file formats are often hit or miss with this player--many .avi files simply refuse to play properly. Many skip regularly at particular scenes, even if the disc is physically pristine. Other's won't even play at all (fortunately, these have been extremely few). And still others will cause the player to inexplicably lose the ability to fast forward or rewind! This latter problem, unfortunately, happens rather often (restarting often helps). <br /> <br />Finally, the remote control is utterly uninspired. The play functions (fast forward, rewind, etc.) are mixed into the menu functions (arrow keys, OK) for a completely unintuitive control experience. I still have to look at the control to execute a function on-the-fly. This coupled with the lack of functionality--which, I suppose, we already knew about with this player--makes for a very bare-bones experience (for example, there is no slow motion and the zoom is laughable). <br /> <br />So why 3 stars? Well, this is certainly an entry level multi-format player. For entry level, the price is right. In fact, it's pretty great. You get what you pay for, folks. If you're more of a home entertainment aficionado, I would highly recommend the Oppo Digital OPDV971H (true region-free and extremely robust multi-format). But then again, the Oppo is three times more expensive!