I needed a cheap, functional DVD player, and did a lot of browsing. Target and Best Buy were hopeless, their only really cheap option was Cyberhome, and the reviews on Cyberhome were more than discouraging. So, I resorted to the Web.
I found this item on Amazon, for an amazing price of $69.99, plus $9 shipping. It's far better than I could possibly have expected for the money.
It plays an amazing range of formats. I haven't tried all of them, yet, but it handles Divxx really well, not to mention MP3, and MPEG. As for regular DVDs, the picture is crisp, and there are sufficient goodies for my personal tastes. Of course, my tastes are rather plebian, I don't really need very many bells and whistles.
The remote is frustrating, but all DVD remotes are. Eventually they'll all settle on a format, and it will be easier. The remote does not have an eject button, but I don't find that to be an issue. If I'm ejecting a disk, it's because I want to do something with it, which means I'm over at the DVD player anyway. Pushing a button while I'm there doesn't seem like a burden to me. If the remote permits frame by frame advance, I haven't found it yet, but again, I have plebian tastes.
I've had occasional hang-ups where the picture just freezes and the only way to get out of the freeze is to fast-forward past it. I'm not certain, but I think that this is actually a disk error, and not a machine error.
If you don't have extra-special needs, this is a marvelous unit, and I recommend it.
Plays DVD-Video, video CD, audio CD, JPEG image CD, and CDs loaded with MP3, MPEG-4, or DivX 3.11/4.x/5.x files Progressive-scan output for seamless, ...More at Amazon Marketplace
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