I have heard almost nothing but good things about Philips’ DVP642. I finally ordered one in July from Amazon as they had the cheapest price at the time. It was on backorder for a month, during which time the price rose around $10. Nevertheless, I still snagged the player at a good price.
I missed the driver, so I took a short trip down to the UPS delivery center, where several employees helped me track down and acquire my package even after the office had closed for the day. It arrived in its official Philips box, with a shipping label slapped on the side from Amazon. Upon my arrival home, I excitedly opened the package.
In any event, the player itself is slick. It has a very thin form factor, and is only around an inch high. It comes with the usual outputs, including RCA, S-Video, Component Video, and Optical Audio. The player supports progressive scan output if your television set supports it. (Mine does not, sadly.) It comes with a set of RCA cables if you do not have any special cables you want to use. I chose to use the stock cables, for now.
The DVP642 seemed happy to play whatever I tossed its way. It played my NTSC region 1 discs happily. It also played region 2 PAL discs, which was satisfying. I suspect one of the more popular features is its ability to play MPEG4 files from a CDR or DVDR, including Divx(tm) 5 and XviD. I had heard it cannot play files encoded with the most recent releases of XviD, but I have no such files to test with. The only down side to playing Divx files on the 642 is you cannot seek. The 642 is also not very tolerant of damaged Divx files. If the media is scratched, expect playback of a Divx to either fail or skip ahead and lose audio sync. Since you cannot seek, your video experience ends if your Divx is corrupt.
Officially, Philips says:
The player does not support GMC and Q-pel. It only supports DivX 4.x and DivX 5.x files recorded in ‘Home theater’ mode. In principal [XviD] is supported, but we won’t guarantee as it is an open source.
It seems Philips has withdrawn their firmware from their Web site. I have no idea why, but the following link no longer provides firmware as of April 24th, 2005. It may have something to do with the newer units shipping with firmware that supports Macrovision(tm) and the firmware I originally linked to had it disabled.
If your player shipped with older firmware, you can easily upgrade to the latest available firmware. Select Software from the preceding link and download the ZIP file. Follow the instructions in the included PDF file to ensure you do not toast your player. You will need a CD burner for this, obviously. I used some old RW media burned at 4X and the player upgraded without incident.
Instead, you may wish to use the firmware for the DVP630 which is extremely similar to the DVP642. Those searching for a firmware upgrade, especially to fix broken subtitle support, might find this thread at videohelp.com useful.
If you need to verify your firmware version, open your tray by pressing and holding stop for two seconds. Then, press 5 6 9 OK on your remote and the firmware revision will show up along with your currently selected model number. I have version 0531 of the firmware on model 642/37 01 S1.
If your new player has version 1109 or later and you want Macrovision(tm) disabled, you can visit one of these sites which all seem to mirror 0531 for the North American release of the 642 and possibly firmware for the 630, too. The last site listed includes firmware that’s modified for better viewing of subtitles. I know nothing else about these firmware versions as I have not used any version other than 0531 on my player. (Oh, and the last link isn’t in English, but the files are supposedly legitimate.)
http://home.ica.net/~robert/Philips/
http://www.geocities.com/ryanxor/arquivos.htm (I also mirrored a copy of these files locally, with a rate limit of around 5KB/s.)
http://www.cfide.com.br/dvp/
All in all, I am very pleased with my DVP642. It’s a slick and functional player from a popular manufacturer.