Bachelor pad upgrade

Why stop at the LCD HD TV when you can get up conversion DVD player?! Got myself a Philips DVP9560 DVD player tonight, it has up conversion, supports all sorts of CD/DVD +/- R/W disk combos. Better yet, it plays DivX and MP3, and WMV. Don't really care about WMV, but I love the fact that it plays MP3 and DivX. I was going to get the Squeezebox, but this DVD player is so much cheaper, $69 @ Bestbuy. Where as the Squeezebox currently costs $299 even after it's been out for at leat a year... And this plays DivX, but Squeezebox dosn't. Did I mention, it has a USB port? So you can plug in an USB harddrive and play off the harddrive.

It was simple enough to hook up the DVD player, everything just worked automagically :-) So, I plugged in my Thecus YES Nano USB enclosure with a 20GB 2.5" Toshiba drive, but it didn't recognize the drive, bummer, I read that people have been having trouble with the USB drives, most people formatted it to FAT32 and it worked, but some say not to use a laptop drive. Well, guess I'll have to pick up a differnt enclosure to try first - cheaper, otherwise, I'll try a desktop harddrive. My drive is formatted to FAT32 BTW. I thought, it may not like my directory structure, so I copied all the file to the drive's root directory, but it still didn't work...


So, next I tried my memory card reader, it has multiple slots for different memory cards. Plug in, and they showed up on the TV. I have a 1GB Memory Stick Pro Duo as well as a 4GB SD card plugged in at the same time. They shown up as USB 1 & 4 on t he TV, so I guess it will work if I plug in a USB hub :-) so, I can connect multiple USB drives to it.



I have directories as well files in the root directory on both memory cards. The all files and directories showed up OK for both cards. But, it failed to play DivX file off the SD card - it would play for a few seconds and then just stop. On the other hand, DivX files as well as JPG files all played OK off the MS, in directories and from the root directory. Since 4GB SD card is not standard, I wonder if it has anything to do with it. But it's really cool to watch an episode of Battlestar Galactica off my MS :-) And when displaying still pictures, pressing the arrow keys on remote will rotate the pictures.

It also played DivX off DVD +R disk flawlessly, fast forwarding worked great.

I'm quite impressed over all, despite a few minor issues - maybe I'm just too picky. The USB is only 1.1, could have been USB 2.0 - so much faster and will be really helpful when playing HD DivX. A lil slow when detecting disks or USB drive - a few people noted as well. The most annoying part is the file name support - it only displays like 8 characters or so, hardly any useful, it would be a pain in the butt to rename all of my MP3 files to shorten the name - even if I removed the artist name from the file name, it would still be too long. *sigh* Anyways, I'm getting a HDMI cable tomorrow from Fry's to try out the video up conversion. Sweet, my bachelor pad is taking shape :-) Next, a good receiver and a pair of good speaker - the audio sounds rather flat from the TV speakers.

More immediate, I need to get my laundry out of the laundry mat tomorrow morning first thing - forgot about it due to the DVD player excitment... :-)