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"dvd player review"
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As PC and consumer electronics vendors work to move digital media off your PC and into your living room, they're calling on a familiar favorite to lead the way: the DVD player. DVD players and recorders have a great advantage over many other approaches to creating a digital home: They are well-established living room products that connect to a TV, the traditional centerpiece of a home entertainment system. Well, assuming you already have a TV and assuming that you might like to be able to move your DVD player around with a minimum of trouble, Sony has an affordable portable DVD player that you might want to check out. The PSYC, as Sony calls it, is a DVD player that can also play audio CDs as well as CD-R/CD-RW discs that are loaded with MP3s. The PSYC weighs less than three pounds and is quite compact when compared to the traditional rectangular stereo component shape of most DVD players. The PSYC is even able to be color matched to your room: the player comes with a silver background from the factory, but there are three color panels that you can insert to change its looks. The world's biggest retailer is offering a DVD player that slices out potentially offensive content from movies, such as nudity, violence and foul language. The device, available at Wal-Mart for about $70, merges video-editing technology developed by ClearPlay with an RCA brand DVD player. The DVD player works by cutting scenes or muting parts of the movie, according to guidelines from ClearPlay's staff of editors, said ClearPlay CEO Bill Aho. The holidays have come to an end. It seems like just yesterday thanks were being given, wrapping paper was being torn to pieces and you were nursing that New Year's hangover. Through it all, you've probably snapped dozens, hundreds-maybe thousands-of digital pictures. Now you've got a hard drive full of snapshots, all dressed up with no place to go. Some of your family and friends have dial-up accounts, so you can't send a slew of pictures that way, and you can't expect them all to come to your house to view the pictures. Heck, maybe some of them don't even own a computer. What to do? Why not create a disc that will play in a DVD player, with your images as a slideshow and maybe some nice holiday background music? With a CD burner, you can create a VCD-a CD which will play in most newer DVD players. (Our DVD player is at least four years old, and it plays VCDs). Philips DVP642 DVD player brings MPEG4 to the masses. WHAT better way to contradict Bill Gates' gloomy predictions about the Death of the DVD than reviewing a very affordable DVD player. This one is able to play almost every file you throw at it, including MPEG1, MPEG2 (.MPG) and AVI video clips encoded in the popular MPEG4 format (with the proprietary codec DivX or the open source Xvid codec). You know, the kind of videos often posted on the web and shared on Peer-to-Peer networks (National Geographic kind of material, I'm told). The Phillips DVP642 quickly won a large following by its low price and hefty feature set, including component video output, NTSC and PAL selectable output signal, and the possibility of making it region free just by entering a sequence of commands on the remote. Oops, the MPAA tells me I was not supposed to say this. In 1999, a 16-year-old Norwegian high school student took on the motion-picture industry and won. The teenager, Jon Johansen, wrote software that decrypted the Content Scrambling System (CSS) that rearranges the bits on prerecorded DVDs to prevent the discs' being played back on unauthorized hardware. Until Johansen wrote his software utility, which he called DeCSS, you could copy the bits from a DVD to your computer hard drive, but because those bits were scrambled, you couldn't play a movie from those copied bits. Playing DVDs under GNU/Linux has not had the happiest of histories, what with the DeCSS debacle and subsequent legal battle. So you'd be forgiven for thinking that you will never be able to play your DVDs on your GNU/Linux system. Luckily, this is not the case, and there are several applications available for you to download and use. The issue with DeCSS is still with us but is slowly getting clearer. However, this has left some of the DVD players officially not supporting encrypted DVDs, although unofficially, playback is possible via third-party additions. Hidden features included in a DVD player released in January have the Motion Picture Association of America contemplating legal action. Thanks to Nerdout.com, both users and the MPAA are aware that the Apex AD-600A player's DVD copyright protection scheme and regional encoding features can be overridden. Developed in China by Visual Disc and Digital Video Corp. (VDDV) and sold in the United States by Apex Digital Inc, the Apex player is attracting attention for reasons besides its low price of US$169.95. Your DVD might not be the first device that springs to mind as a channel for connecting your PC to your home entertainment system, but why not? DVD players can already handle some of the files stored on your PC: MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 movies and in many cases MP3s. And DVD players are already on good terms with your TV and your sound system. Add a PC card slot for wired or wireless networking; toss in support for WMA music, MPEG-4 video and JPEG still images; and you've got yourself a pretty good PC-to-entertainment-center bridge. Samsung's DVD-V4600 DVD/VCR combo has a full complement of AV inputs and outputs for its 4 Head HiFi VCR section, as well as composite, component, and S-Video outputs for the DVD side. There is both a digital optical and digital coaxial output for DD 5.1 and DTS soundtracks. The DVD side is compatible with CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, and (VCD) discs. For TVs with no AV inputs, the DVD-V4600 also has RF outputs.
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