Pros: Good construction, great price, good DVD playback, reliability, plays avi.
Cons: Only plays avi. No ogg or mkv. Need to re-encode some Divx files.
The Bottom Line: Quality DVD player even without Divx feature. The Divx feature could cover a broader base, but you don't really pay extra for it over other players. Good player.
This DVD player comes with a unique feature that makes it very worth it's $45 price tag on Amazon right now. It plays Divx files that are encoded into .avi format. It will also play Xvid files. Now there is a lot of content available on the internet, especially if you are interested in early fan subs of unlicensed anime that come in these file formats. So having this feature on such a modestly priced DVD player is highly appealing. You can fit a 26 episode series on a single 4 GB DVD instead of having the series sprawl over half of a DVD shelf. Especially with large collections this can be very useful. I will look at three different elements of this player, durability of construction and electronic components, DVD playback, and Divx playback.
Durability: This is a solid player. I know three people who have this player, and none of them have had any failures or flukes with it. The mechanics seem to be reliable over a number of years, though this model hasn't been out exceptionally long, so I cannot comment on it's functionality past 2 years.
DVD Playback: The quality of playback, and the reliability of picture and audio has been wonderful with this model. I haven't run into any problems with any of the Hong Kong disks I have purchased. As the vast majority of the Hong Kong titles I have are films such as Uzumaki that cannot be purchased in the US on a region 1 disk this is very important to me. The one fluke I have found with this player and DVD playback is that on commercial US anime series disks occasionally it resets the language defaults every time a new episode begins. It doesn't happen with every series, and the series it happens with don't have this problem on all players. Outlaw Star was an exciting game of catch the episode before Jet started giving his pre-show public service announcements. It's a minor nuisance, but still worth mentioning.
Divx Playback: This feature is what really sets this model apart from most DVD players. It is also the source of most of it's quirks. Divx playback is inconsistent. Some files are wonderful, and some files won't play at all, or play very poorly. Now if you get a standard Xvid or Divx codec and re-encode your files using Dr. Divx, or some other programs it will fix this problem. I think this is not so much a problem with the player, but a matter of the player supporting the "correct" Divx specification and not all files on the internet being encoded quite correctly, especially older files that were encoded on the Divx 3.11 alpha codec. Not everyone is going to be comfortable opening up their files in Dr. Divx or VirtualDub and re-encoding them if they don't work on the player in the first place. And you have to burn a DVD first to see if they are the right kind of file. Also re-encoding results in slight quality loss as Divx is hardly a lossless codec. There is another model of this player that has a USB port that supports external USB hard drives. This potentially removes the issue of wasted disks being spent finding out if a set of files works or not, but it is still a hassle. If you are hard up on wanting to play Divx files on your TV without hooking up a MythTV box then this is worth the time, but it is not a flawless implementation. So be ready for a little bit of work.
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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