recommendations for a portable DVD player

[sergebroom]

I've told my wife that, for Christmas, I'd VERY much like to get one single present - a portable DVD player. When I asked about this earlier this year on Making Light, I was recommended Philips's DCP750 and DCP951. I later looked at the DCP951 and it is indeed neat, but there's a problem. A friend burned some DVDs for me. I'm not sure of the exact format, but my friend has a Mac, and the only way I could play those DVDs on my laptop is if I loaded some software called AVP. I'd do that, except that my laptop really is my employer's and they understandably don't like unauthorized softwares.

Would anyone have some recommendations for a player with a 10-inch screen, or something in that range, that can play all kinds of formats? I know it'd be too much to also hope for something that can handle DVDs from outside the North-American region, but, hey, there's no harm in asking.

And, regarding different formats... What is PAL?

Comments

[whl.livejournal.com]

PAL is the analog television standard used in England, and some other places.

Where here in the US I have 60 frames per second, PAL has 50; where I have 525 scan lines in a frame, PAL has 625. The old US standard is called NTSC.

In the old days of analog electronics for television, converting between them was a rare capability. Now, it's commonplace.

More important is whether or not your player can be tricked into being "region free"; the world was divided up into numbered areas so that people some parts would have to wait for the official release of a movie there, instead of watching a smuggled US version. In point of fact, many players can be tricked into playing disks from other regions.

There are six regions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_region_codes), and a couple of special ones.

I do not use portable players, so all I can say is that Phillips is my brand of choice for DVD players in general, particularly the regular units with DiVX support, and a USB port for storage devices. Both the players you mention have SD card slots, which is good, but likely to top out at 2 GB of storage.

Possibly your friend needs to tweak his settings; if he was trying to make video DVDs, then he might need to change blank disk providers; if he was making DVD-ROMs of video files, possibly a different version of the compression standard used would help. It is possible to make an unplayable disk on any machine under any OS, alas, but it need not be a regular thing.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

I asked about PAL is because I recently found that the stage production of Jeff Wayne's musical of War of the Worlds is available on DVD, but only in Great Britain and in PAL. I expect it'd be region-locked, but,if I could find a region-freeable player, I'd be extremely happy.

As for those DVDs that my friend made for me... Those are Star Trek's New Voyages, which are available on the web. She downloaded them to her Mac then burned the DVDs. I could ask her about what you suggested.

In a nutshell, from what you said, it sounds like I should focus on Phillips models.

Thanks again.

[ckd]

Most region-free players will also do NTSC/PAL conversion. Our Philips (which has a not-too-secret magic remote code to disable region locking) is among them.

This has led to a lot of purchases from amazon.co.uk.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Heck. I can think of a few UK video purchases I'd go for, besides War of the Worlds. May I ask what your Phillips model is, and what the screen size is?

[ckd]

It's the DVP-3140, but it's a console, not a portable, so the screen size is "whatever's hooked up to it".

We do most of our portable video watching on either iPods or laptops, though of course watching DVDs on those would require some kind of software to rip and convert them, and that would be Wrong according to Jack "the VCR is like the Boston Strangler" Valenti, so nobody would do that. If someone were evil enough to do that, though, an extra DVD-ROM drive that has its region set to 2 would be mighty handy and not all that expensive.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

(Note to self: a sign of one's evil nature is a DVD-ROM set to region 2.)

[readinggeek451]

I don't have any specific recommendations (it's been a while since I bought mine), but I do note that 7" is a good size for the distance one actually holds them. If you're wedded to 10", I'm not trying to dissuade you, but you may find you don't actually need one that big to be happy.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Oh, I am flexible as to the size of the screen, especially if the player can handle the formats I mentionned above. Does yours do that? If so, may I ask what its brand and model are?

[readinggeek451]

Mine's a Panasonic DVD-LS50. (Several years old, so they're probably not making these any more.) I haven't tried it on non-prerecorded DVDs, but it plays my home-burned CDs better than my regular DVD player does. Consumer Reports said that Panasonics handled minor scratches better than most brands, for what that's worth.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip. I'll add it to things to keep in mind when I go to stores and start testing. And testing I will definitely do, on my own, because the people who work there don't know anything. The proof will be in the pudding - or in the playing.