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I purchased this DVD player a few days ago and have been nothing but pleased by its performance. It is a great deal for what you get: a stylish and attractive design, complete audio/video outputs (s-video, digital/optical audio, analog, etc.), full DVD player capabilities, and most of all, the ability to play DivX/Xvid (MPEG-4).

I've tested all kinds of media with this player and have been thoroughly satisfied. I viewed some high quality DivX-compressed movies on CD-R's in outstanding clarity without a hitch, played mp3 cds (not many features but OK), and watched DVDs (if you're clever you can even make the player region-free).

There's already a firmware upgrade for the player which expands its capabilities to support subtitle files (srt, sub, smi) alongside media files. It was a quick and easy process to upgrade the firmware, and I tested many DivX movies with subtitles and they worked fine. Hopefully in a future firmware upgrade they'll upgrade the menu system, which I found a bit clumsy.

I have two issues concerning the playback MPEG-4 files: occasionally, a movie file encoded with less popular audio codec (like OGG or PCM) will be silent; also, you can only rewind/fast forward at 8x and you cannot skip to a specific time in the movie.

Overall, this player is extremely capable and is a GREAT deal for its price. I'd strongly recommend it.

I recently purchased the Philips DVP642 DVD player and I am quite pleased with it. I have a lot of files in .avi format, and it takes me several hours to encode them in DVD, SVCD, or VCD format to play on a DVD player. Now, with this player, I can just put my .avi files onto CD-Rs, pop them in the DVD player let the machine do the rest.

The quality that AVI, DIVX, and MPEG-4 are displayed in is amazing. The files play much better than they do on my home computer. This is thanks to a "smart" technology that the player uses to enhance compressed video. Many scenes will appear in almost DVD quality.

Many users have complained about the sloppy interface. I tend to disagree. Although other DVD players offer far better interfaces, this one holds up quite well. It will not distract from the overall experience you will have with this product. The remote control feels more like a television remote, though.

This unit is not perfect. It doesn't play Nero Digital MPEG-4s. There isn't any sound on non-VOB structured MPEG-2 files, nor is there any sound when miniDVDs are played (but who uses those anyways). However, a simple file conversion program will solve most of these problems allowing you to keep up to 2 hours of very good quality video on one CD. No DVD players are perfect and the bottom line is for $70 this unit is a steal. If you have a lot of video files laying around on your cpu and a cd burner, this player is a must buy.

My friend recommended me DVP642 because it is the one DVD player under 200$ that can play PAL format. But when I finally bought it online I was really surprised how many features this player has... So far I didnt have any problem playing DVD, DivX, miniDVD, CDs, VideoCD! I tried different brands DVDs, both -R/+R , so far all of them were playing great. If you have a problem with a sound, it means you didnt use right setting while writing your DVD. Read a help file or change a software. I am going to buy a couple more as gifts for my family and friends.