I love my Philips DVP642

[JustAGuy]

A few months ago I bought a new DVD player.  I researched various DVD players, and one specific model jumped out at me.

Amazon.com link to a Philips DVP642 DVD player
(I am not being paid to post the above link)



The Philips DVP642 DVD player is much like every other DVD player out on the market.    It's a slimline model in a silver-grey colour.  It's certainly not the nicest-looking DVD player out on the market (and frankly, the remote sucks arse).  Price-wise, it's right in line with the Sony/JVC/Samsung/etc single-disc DVD player offerings.  I paid about $90CAD for mine.

So why did I buy a Philips DVP642?

It's a DivX-certified DVD player.  It can play any DivX 3.11/4.x/5.x compressed video right out of the box.  By extension, it will also play XviD.  Seriously, the Philips DVP642 will play just about any type of video you throw at it.

It can even handle multiple video files burned to a single disc.  I have a few CD-Rs with Thomas the Tank Engine episodes saved to them.  The episodes are all saved in different formats (some are DivX, some XviD, some mpeg).  There are multiple episodes saved per disc, and the Philips DVP642 can play them all flawlessly in sequence.

Just as a test and proof, I downloaded the World of Warcraft June 2004 gameplay trailer and burned it to CD-R.  It's a DivX compressed video file @ 14 MB.  I popped it in my DVP642 DVD player and took some pictures of the aftermath.


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Nice! I have that same TV. It's ridiculously heavy. I sometimes wonder if it will one day make my floor collapse, and drop into the basement.

As far as the DVD player goes, it looks nice. I don't even own a DVD player, not counting the Xbox that is. I've got a modded box, and it takes care of all of my media needs. There's this app called Xbox Media Center, and it streams video content, music, pictures, you name it, over the network to the 'box and plays it without any problems. With the High Definition pack, you can even get the Dolby Digital Audio and 480p out of it (not on that TV, unfortunately). Quite delicious. I've also got Linux on there, but it's mainly just a novelty (save for the SAMBA file sharing), as it's brutally slow.