dvp642

The philips DVP642 is a standalone DVD player that you can pickup at walmart, bestbuy, compusa, amazon.com etc.. its an entry level player and mine was 59$ at bestbuy. after tax it came to $64. I had two 25$ giftcards so out of pocket expense was around 14$.

you can learn a little about it at afterdawn.com

features:
plays divx
plays xvid
plays mp3
plays JPG
region free by code punched in with remote
slim design
firmware upgradable
at $59 it is afforadable even if it had to be used as a boat anchor.

I gave it a bit of a rundown last night which was a little difficult because I don't own a TV. I pushed the video through the capture card. for some reason the program I was using (WINDVR) gets a big fat white box in the middle of the screen when playing DVD's but it didnt do this during any of my other testing. i'm sure its because my copy of windvr isn't registered correctly. how ironic. a piece of software that i actually OWN and it doesn't work right. that really makes you want to purchase software doesn't it.. but i digress.

things that would make this worth 10$ more:
show me more of the filename. it only shows the first 11 characters
read the TOC faster.. it can take 30 seconds to load a pretty big CD
play mp3's in random order. it may do this but I didn't read the manual yet.

all in all.. i'm very happy with the purchase. it will be lent out to some of my technological deprived friends who still watch video on a standard A/V system and don't have a method for alternative formats.