Greetings all. I have read a few comments about the 642's inability to display widescreen DVDs correctly. Hadn't noticed it myself until I tried a video setup DVD which had geometry tests. For the 16:9 image (large round circle in middle, 1 small circle in each corner), it was obvious that a fair portion was cropped. I also started noticing the problem in a few commercial DVDs, for example, when a sign was shown at the edge of the image. I confirmed that it's not the TV or the disc. Video options on player are also correctly configured. Has anyone had the same problem, and if so, know of a fix?
Which is the best firmware for this machine? I've got 0531 at the mo but it had a few issues. I've heard it's not worth upgrading to 1109 as all it does is enable macrovision and subitle char sets i don't need. Any feedback on this? Any news from philips on a new firmware release? Also, can anyone recomend any hacked firmware? Thanks.
Hey guys, I just got this player. I was very hesistant as, so many people reported problems. I HATE having to re-encode anything, cause of how long it takes, so I have been waiting for a divx standalone player Anyhow, I have a few hundred movies in divx and xvid, many encoded not by myself, and in many ways. I was having some issues at first, but now thanx to some of your tricks and tricks from other forums, I have got 99% of my movies working perfectly. Keep in mind i don't use subtitles. The few tricks that got me to 99% 1)use mpeg4modifier to make sure Aspect ratio is set to "Square Pixels" If not, just click on square pixels and save as new copy. 2) I use verbatim disks and memorex dvd+r's. Only ones i've used. They seem to work great. 3)I always shut all other programs down when burning. Even restart comp with nothing running but nero and burn six to seven disks in a row and then get back to normal activities. And the greatest difference, I have noticed is Always burning at the slowest speed (2.4x)(I only burn dvd's)
I have had this player for over a year. Actually, my first one was stolen when my house was robbed, so I am on my second one. A couple of things I would like to share. First off, I had the "Jail Bars" problem, and as has been mentioned in this forum switching the Progressive Scan on and off will clear this for a while. However, my new player has no jail bars whatsoever on any of my DVDs or Divx files. So, is it a hardware issue, a defective unit? Who knows, but I am sure glad it is gone. Also, I know several people have complained about the noise or "chirping" that the player makes, and I was one of the ones wondering what all the complaining was about. Well, my old player was completely silent, but the new one sounds like it has a whole NEST of birds living in it. SO, apparently some of these issues are machine specific, and do not occur from one machine to the other. The last thing I would like to mention is that I have apparently been lucky in that EVERY subtitle file that I have ever tried has played flawlessly, with the exception of 2 or 3 that I had to hit the system menu button twice to make them legible. However, last night I had an srt file that simply would not play. I checked it on my PC and it looked fine. I popped one of my other divx movies with subs into the PC and noticed that the .srt extension on the file that worked was all caps (ie:.SRT) while the one that didn't work was all lowercase. For grins I renamed the non-working .srt to .SRT, and now it works fine. No idea whay this should make any difference, but it may be something to try for some of you having subtitle problems. Chris
Magick29: Same models behaving differently. Well this is really irritating. My player dosen't make any noise, its really silent. But it suffers from pixelation issues. Many times just fuzzy/low quality blocks are formed. I have seen testimonies of ppl claiming that the picture is very clean. So the pixelation issue also seems to be one of such issues. Anyway are there any other ppl on this board who have observed the pixelation problem on their unit?
I thought the noise was normal. Mine makes that LOUD CHIRPING NOISE when the player's reading the file at start. But as soon as the movie starts, it's fine; the noise goes away.
not sure if this helps you out on the subtitle thing but it did for me to get the subtitles to work i had to press the #2 button on the remote then i cycled through my subtitle buttion till i got to the subtitle file and it work hope it helps somehow
I have a xvid file with seperate srt subtitle files. I burned the avi and srt files in a common file, they both have the same name, I labeled the srt files in caps (SRT) and I still can't get the darned things to work.
well i finally got this player and so far i like it, i have tested other region dvds, PAL and NTSC, dvd-r, dvd+r and CD-RW, all do work with no problems well so far... expet for one thing on some of my .mpg and .avi i get no sound when playing it on dvp642, is there anything i can do?
I'm getting the same problem that I've seen others have in that some of my mpeg2 don't have sound. I can play them fine on my computer's dvd player but I get the same problem with VLC, quicktime, wmv, etc. I'm a total newb and using a mac so any dumbed down suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thx
I'm getting the same problem that I've seen others have in that some of my mpeg2 don't have sound. I can play them fine on my computer's dvd player but I get the same problem with VLC, quicktime, wmv, etc. I'm a total newb and using a mac so any dumbed down suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thx
Just got my dvp642 flashed with 1109 version. Two issues here: 1. Ver1109 doesn't seems to fix the wierd color/pixelated problem of one of my Xvid playback. I still have to hit system menu botton twice to get it to normal. 25.000 Frms/sec Frame size: 384x160 2. I am still unable to get it to play one of my XviD file that had been reencoded with VirtualDub to get rid of Qpel and GMC. I can see the file displayed as Mpeg4, but it won't play and says "codec not supported". 25.000 Frms/sec Frame size 552x420 What could be the problem?
Ref: audio not working: Typically I've seen this when it was encoded with either Ogg Vorbis audio or AC3 audio. For the Mac, it's been awhile for me since my Mac G4 went TU (that's a military term for "broken") but I used to be able to play MPEG4 videos in Quicktime with a helper application. If you can open it in Quicktime, you should be able to check the audio (and video) streams, and it will tell you what format the audio is in. For the PC, get a program called GSpot http://www.headbands.com/gspot/. It is the BEST codec checking program out there, and free. I use the latest beta, which is quite stable. Open the avi in GSpot, and it will tell you everything about the file - the video code, the audio code, the frame rate, the "special" encoding used (i.e. QPel, etc), the ratio - everything. Check what the audio is encoded with. If it is Ogg or AC3, you'll want to reencode the audio to MP3. It's easy with VirtualDub, but I suggest you check www.doom9.org for any instructions.
This is my first DVD player. With a prerecorded commercial disk in my DVP642, I am unable to turn on the Program function in the General Setup Page within the System Menu. Is this specific to homemade disks? Is there additional software needed to add indexing information. Would this provide a Bookmark type function? I talked to Philip's technical support, but they didn't have a clue why it didn't work or what it was supposed to do. Thanks, Howard
I had thought this was a great player for months until now. It says 'NO DISC' to a Verbatim DVD+R DL 8.5 Gb burned with Toast 6.07 on Mac OS X 10.2.8. The dvd+r dl 8.5 gb format is double layer and probably will give you problems on this player. I was excited about straight copying my dvd's without recompression but I guess I will still have to shrink dvd-9. I have never had a mac burned disk not work on this player until now. PC burned disks, especially Nero 5 disks, played on 5 out of 7 players whereas Toast burned disks played on 7 out of 7. I suppose the DVD+r DL 8.5 GB disks will not be supported until Blue ray. Any word on the DVP and these +R DL's? Jimmy
Hey guys, For anyone having a problem with the DVP642 and DivX/XviD (like vid/aud desync and inability to ffw/rew), try this trick: Make a dummy AVI file about 1MB in size... if you can't do this then use an MP3 about that size. Burn it *last* on the disc after your main movie(s) and subtitles. Now try it again... this has cured a lot of my DVP642 issues. I still hate the ugly vertical lines visible in medium-lit scenes, but other than that I feel better about my player now. IMO the problem is this player just sux reading CD-R discs (in particular), it just is no good at it and seems to trip up at the very end of the disc. If you burn DVD's, try stick to the DVD+R format with booktype "DVD-ROM" -- This seems to work best. Good luck
Zisguy1, When you say "burn it *last*" , do you mean create a multisession disc (cd or dvd?) and burn the dummy file on the second session?
No, I mean use a single session but burn it physically last on the disc (near the outer edge, right before the lead-out). Not sure if Nero lets you do this, but NTI CD/DVD Maker puts things in the order you add them to the CD. If you try this, try naming the 'dummy' file something like ZZZZ.AVI so it would alphabetically show as the last also.
Oh yeah, a reply to another message: You left out a step. 6. Once the movie is playing, you have to press the "subtitles" button again to actually turn subtitles on. Try pressing it multiple times & select the Latin 2 encoding for larger subtitles.
