The Rise of the DVD Player

Posted on April 23, 2007
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 123 views |

philipsdvdplayerA few weeks ago my faithful DVD player died . This weekend I got a new one, the Philips DVP5960/37 (the name is much more impressive than the machine, I assure you). I chose this one for three reasons:

  1. It was recommended by a friend and I’m lazy enough and don’t care enough about TV image quality that that alone put it at the top of the list
  2. It is cheap. Really cheap. NCIX lists it for $119 but BestBuy sells it for $99
  3. It has a USB port in the front, which I have no real immediate use for but more ports is always better. That’s a truism, that is

So far the machine has been everything I expected from it (it plays DVDs) with two surprises, one pleasant the other not all that surprising in hindsight.

First, it can be easily unlocked and set to region code 0. I don’t have any non-Region 1 DVDs to test this with but the idea of buying hardware that tells me what I can and can’t do with it rankles my hackles so un-region code I did.

Second, the USB port cannot be used to access my 250Gig external USB2 drive in the manner I want it to. This DVD player only recognizes FAT32 file system and FAT32 has a filesize limitation of slightly less than 4 Gigs (you Easynews users already know where I’m going with this, don’t you?). 4 Gigs is slightly less than the size of a DVD image which means if someone theoretically had 200 Gigs or so of hypothetical DVD images they wanted to load onto an improbably unlikely-to-exist external hard drive, they wouldn’t be able to do so in any useful way regardless.

I suspect they choose FAT32 for that very reason, since FAT32 really is a suck-ass file system as far as modern file systems go.

My only complaint is no S-Video out. It does have HDMI which I guess is a big deal but my TV doesn’t do HDMI so I’m still stuck with the ol’ RCAs. Such is life.

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