Philips DVP5960

I just bought a new DVD player to replace our perfectly working existing version. But this one is so much cooler! It has a USB port on the front, which most people gloss over at the mere mention of interrelations between household electronics and computer technology. However, I see the potential here. With a USB input, you could plug in a pen drive or an external hard drive loaded with MP3’s and video files to be displayed on your TV. In my rather unorthodox case, the computer monitor is actually larger than the family TV. Not that my computer monitor is that impressive, it’s just that the TV in the living room is quite inferior. At any rate, I have a collection of videos – err…they’re home videos – that have been encoded with DivX. They’re much smaller than what a DVD can hold and encoding to MPEG DVD’s would take forever. Instead, I can simply load up the pen drive (they’re running 8GB’s now) with a few movies – two hour flicks run about 1.5GB each – and pop it into the front of my new Philips DVP5960 to have instant access to the movies contained within. An intuitive file browser pops up with filenames for anything I could play with the player.

I’ve only just started using it tonight, though I did discover a problem rather quickly. I’m having an audio sync issue. It may be related to the audio channel embedded within the DivX format, but for some reason my simple stereo out setup isn’t sounding correct. There’s even some lip sync setting within the DVD setup menu, but it doesn’t seem to correct my problem. There’s also a fair amount of echo in the audio channel – not so much that it’s impossible to listen to, just so much that everything sounds dramatic. Any hints on this little problem would be greatly appreciated!