by Noah Kravitz, Reviews Editor

23 August 2006

Home Media Nirvana, Pt 2: Mac mini, iPod Video, or a $70 Philips DVD Player?

Missed Part One? Read it here.

IV. A DVD Player with a USB Port?

In the meantime, for research purposes only (of course!), I was trying to get a Divx file of a TV show I'd downloaded off of my iBook and onto my TV set. Using Toast to burn a DVD of the show was slow - Toast had to re-encode the Divx file to MPEG in order to create a DVD that my player could deal with. Since my DVD player had been acting funny anyway, I started looking around for a DVD player that could read Divx files, figuring that this kind of player would let me burn Divx video to a disc without re-encoding. While this would still require some SneakerNetting of the DVD from iBook to DVD player, it would at least cut down on the time it took to go from downloading to viewing.

So I surfed over to DealNews, searched for "DVD Player Divx," and found the DVP 5960. Three things set this model apart from your average DVD player: 1. Video upscaling with HDMI out; 2. Divx support up to v6 and Ultra; 3. Support for playback from USB drives. That last one was too good to pass up. I hopped in the car, drove to the local outpost of the big chain store that had the player on sale for $69.99, and picked one up.

It's true: The slim, mirror-finished DVP 5960 not only plays Divx video burned as data on to CDs and DVDs (which is so much faster a process than encoding them to MPEG and then burning to DVD), but it also has a USB port right there on the front panel. And a USB button on the remote. So I copied a bunch of stuff to my 4GB flash drive and plugged it into the Philips. "Device not supported," was the message I got back from the TV screen. Hmmm. Thankfully, the Internet is chock full of information and some of it is even useful. Google led me to Videohelp.com's forums and the undocumented fact that supported USB devices must be low-power (check) and formatted with FAT32 (oops). Some more Googling taught me that Mac OS X's Disk Utility app does FAT32 formatting, but calls it "MS-DOS File System." Sure. So I reformatted the flash drive, recopied the files, and voila! I can play Divx files on my TV from a USB drive through this crazy DVD player. Amazing.

The DVP 5960 can also play MP3 and WMA audio, along with JPEG images, from a disc or USB drive. It cannot play AAC audio, nor does it have a remote that provides feedback on a built-in display. So it doesn't fit my initial criteria for a home media center. But something about a $70 device available at cookie-cutter consumer electronics stores that can play movies from a hard drive just tickles me pink, so to speak. Sure one still has to download the movies and copy them to a hard drive using a computer, and then physically plug the drive into the machine. But I already have a computer and a USB drive, and the DVD player costs seventy bucks! That's amazing. And there's no hacking (save the annoying FAT32 trick) involved - just plug it in and it works.

I downloaded a bunch of Divx files from the Net and tried them out. They played back from USB and DVD sources smooth and clean - or at least as smoothly and cleanly as they did on my Mac (these are homegrown source files I downloaded from a Torrent site). Next on my to-do list is hooking the player up to an HDTV via HDMI to see how Hi-Def content looks; the widescreen movies played back in letterbox format on my standard-def set with excellent results.

V. Conclusion: Two For The Price of One

Would I like a Mac mini to serve as the central nervous system of my media collection? Sure. Would it be great to have one box that's always ready and willing to stream music and video to any of my computers, TVs, or stereo systems? You bet. But for the money, the iPod + Philips solution seems to offer me the best of all worlds with the best user interface experience. So for now, it's my home media center of choice.

Plus, seeing that USB thumb drive plugged into the front of my DVD player? At the risk of mixing metaphors, that's music to the ears of my inner geek.

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