On 12 Apr 2005 11:05:13 GMT, Mark Cranness
<> wrote:
>"abcd" <> wrote in
>news:425b94ca$:
>
>> I'm looking for a DVD player with DivX support for the living
>> room. The device should be able to read DivX AVI movies directly
>> off a DVD-R (with several movies per DVD-R media in this case of
>> course), not just a CD-Rs.
>
>Philips DVP642K
>http://www.videohelp.com/dvdplayers.php?DVDname=dvp642
>
>(Or dvp630 which is more or less the same thing.)
>
>Mark
I have a DVP-642K/75 and while it does work, it is not the best unit
in the world, but it was the only one that is readily available in New
Zealand for a reasonable price at the time. I have had a number of
problems with mine, including its first lock up requiring a power
cycle last night. I am not very impressed by it, but it is fairly
cheap.
The problem I encounter most often is that if I push the next track
button while in the middle of playing a track from a data DVD, when it
starts to play the next track it will often stop after 1 second. If
you push the system menu button twice (go into the menu and out again)
it will then play normally, or if you use the fast forward buttons
then push play.
When you go backwards in some files, you can often wind up suddenly
playing a loop of the last 1 or 2 seconds of the file. Only rarely
does going backwards work correctly for more than a few seconds. This
is on tracks from data disks - it does go backwards on authored DVDs.
It does not play DivX files that have the optional QPEL or GMC
options. The DivX spec does not require a unit to play such files,
but they are becomming more common and some chipsets do play them, or
at least the most common subset of them.
It plays Xvid files, but fast forward, backwards and "go to" do not
work at all on Xvid (they do work on DivX, sort of).
It does not play any sound from AVI files that have PCM type audio
tracks. It does play MP2, MP3 and AC3.
The first one I got, I immediately tried to update its firmware and it
crashed during the process, despite my having followed all the
instructions from the Philips web site carefully. It was replaced
under warrantee, and then I was told not to try updating the firmware
again, by the Philips helpline and by L V Martins. Not good at all,
since there are clear bugs in the firmware that might be fixed in a
later version. L V Martins did say if I could bring it in and show
them some bugs they might look at it for me, but I have not done that
yet. I need to build a test DVD to demonstrate all the problems to
them, but I have not found the time yet. I will have to before the
warantee runs out.
There is a Sony model available that plays DivX, but it only reads UDF
formatted disks and I already had over 50 ISO formatted DVDs, so I
could not use it. There might be a couple of other quite expensive
models available here (Pioneer? Yamaha? Denon?).
In Australia, there seems to be a quite nice cheap unit available,
according to the reviews of it:
http://www.zensonic.com/z330.php
It uses a better chipset than the DVP-642K/75.
And they are working on what looks like a very nice (but more
expensive) unit, but it is not available for a couple of months yet:
http://www.z500series.com
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