Philips DVP642 DivX-Certified Progressive-Scan DVD Player : Reviews, Cheap, Discount Tv Television

Average Rating: 4.31 out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Great Value
Picked this player up, and contrary to a few reviews I've seen around it DOES play dvd-r discs. I've played ritek, fuji, and tdk dvd-r discs burned at 4x with no problem. I have not tried dvd-rw. It takes a sec or two longer to load discs than my other player, but for $69 with xvid and divx playback and the ability to enter a code via the remote to enable region free playback you can't go wrong (look around online).

My unit was set to component output by default and was black and white when i first turned it on using s-video, just change the output in the setup and it'll be normal for s-video use.

Rating:

- 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).

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).

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.

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.

Overall, this player is extremely capable and is a GREAT deal for its price. I'd strongly recommend it.

Rating:

- amazing unit best investment ever
I was looking for some type of player that could play direct divx, and this unit does that and a lot more, the only trouble that I noticed was that in some vcd's the audio kept crawling out of sinc, I downloaded a firmware update for it, and it not only correct it, it also modified my region codes so now it's multiregion and plays even more formats. So far I been using it daily for six months and I'm still amazed from all the potential that it has, just yesterday I learned that it can play a avi movie file with subtitles for it in a diffrent file side by side, I'm very happy with it and my father and brother got one for themselves and are equaly amazed.