Buying a new DVD player

[Glen Miyashiro]

Help!

I was shopping for a new DVD player and got overwhelmed by all the acronyms. Some of them I know, like DivX and JPEG, because I play video files on my PC in those formats. But what's HDMI, or SACD? And are they important? I want a player that will play standard DVDs but which can also handle audio and video discs that I burn from my computer. What should I be looking for?

[Leo Lakio]

Re: Buying a new DVD player

SACD (Super Audio Compact Disc) is a format devised by Sony & Philips, intended to provide higher quality audio than standard compact discs. If you see that on a DVD player, it means that it is capable of playing that format of disc.

If this isn't going to be your primary CD player as well, or if you aren't buying these audiophile discs, then it's not relevant to your DVD (or burned CD) experience. But it may not add anything extra to the price of the player, either.

[Leo Lakio]

Re: Buying a new DVD player

HDMI is High-Definition Multimedia Interface, an evolving technology for providing an uncompressed digital video stream for Hi-Def tv sets. Again, it may not be relevant to what you need at present, but it may not be an additional cost.

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: Buying a new DVD player

Thanks for the clarifications. Guess they mostly don't matter to a regular user like me.

[shaveice]

Re: Buying a new DVD player

if you're just a typical user, i may have a useful suggestion for you:

Philips DVP642 DVD Divx Player $54.99. March 28, 2006
BestBuy.com has the highly sought after Philips DVP642 DVD/CD/MP3/Divx Player on sale for $54.99, free in store pickup.

This is currently the hacker's favorite dvd player. Plays those downloaded movies. DVD, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/+RW, CD, CD-R/RW, VCD, SVCD, MP3-CD, MPEG-4, Picture-CD and DivX 3.11/4.x/5.x, AVI. 4x video upsampling enhances all outputs.

Also plays JPEG, mpg, Xvid, PAL DVDs, PAL Divx, KVCD, SRT. It also has Progressive scan and 4x upsampling. You can just dump these files on a DVD and it will start playing them. No need to specially format the disk. We've verified it ourselves.

................

another advantage? there's a simple hack to make it region free which means that you'll be able to play dvds from outside the u.s. as well as u.s. made dvds.

oh, one last thing: i'm not recommending best buy; i just found the little blurb with the best buy info that's current. you can always look elsewhere.

if you go to amazon's site, you'll see that they don't sell it directly any longer but you can read any of the 536 reviews (wow!) with a great 4 out of 5 stars.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...Fencoding=UTF8

good luck.

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: Buying a new DVD player

That sounds great! Thanks for the tip.