Boring Tech Stuff

Was going to post interesting observations on my european vacation, but can't be bothered to indulge you with them. Instead, I'll indulge myself with some tech rambling. I got hold of one of the highly sought-after Philips DVP642 DVD players this weekend, by the cunning ruse of going into WalMart on Friday afternoon and buying one. These machines have been hard to get hold of lately, due to a lot of interest in them on the internet. They are fairly cheap ($70) slimline DVD players, with two very nice features:

1) It plays MPEG and DivX movies burned onto DVD+R/+RW using standard burning software.
2) It becomes region free through entering a code on the remote.

Both of these features are very important to me. I don't like sitting in front of the computer to watch things, it isn't the same environment as watching TV. Yet, since I'm too lazy to get a VCR or be in at the right times, or if I want to watch old or foreign TV shows, then I download a lot of TV shows (a remarkably grey area, legally, but let's brush over that). Until recently, I've been using the Apex 1100 ($45 from WalMart in 2002), which can play MPGs only, but is not region free). The Apex is an amazing machine, and has played pretty much every file I've thrown at it over the last eighteen months. But a lot of things I want to watch are DivX, and I'm too lazy to convert them -- it hardly seems worth the effort. It also has a very good user interface: ability to pause, ffwd and rewind at up to 16x, and jump to any point in the file.

Perhaps surpisingly, the Philips interface is a little less nice. It does display up to 16 chars of the filename instead of 8 on the Apex, but going through the filelist takes longer -- it always seems to be reading from the disk instead of caching the directory listing. Ffwd and rewind work well enough, but only up to 8x, and direct point access also is a little more clunky than on the Apex (you have to enter 00:10 to jump to ten minutes in, even if the file is less than an hour long, and then press 'OK'). Peculiarly, there seems no way to display the length of the file, or time remaining.

Format-wise, it seems to cope pretty will with a large variety of DivX/Xvid/MPG versions. It baulks at WMV, but who wouldn't, and seemed to crash occasionally on some Xvid files. Also, because of the wide variety of codecs out there, it's not surprising that it occasionally runs into something that it can't handle: it didn't like one avi that had Xvid video but the Divx/WMA audio codec, and played the video without any sound. But it still succeeds on a large fraction of things I have tried on it, and played a 90minute movie last night without any problems.

Yes, it's not quite as universal as a modded Xbox with xbox media center would be, but that requires a lot more time, money, effort and swearing than the DVP642 that worked straight out of the box. The region free setting was also easy, and means that I can now enjoy my imported copies of A Very Peculiar Practice and The High Life, neither of which are likely to be release in Region 1 any time soon.