£39.99 - Mini MPEG4 HDMI DVD Player with USB and Card Reader

Wee_Fifer

Got one of these and its brill!!! Small, take up no room at all, works brilliantly with my usb pen (usb 2), no more flaffin around with discs,lol :jdivx, 5.1 capability too and HD.
Superb bargain from Maplin! Staff reserved for me so i could collect it next day!

Heres the link Maplin
Here's the info on the spec!
• Multi-format DVD player with HDMI output for quality upscaling
• USB and memory card (SD, MMC and MS) slots to view photos, listen to music and playback MPEG4 (AVI) video
• Component, HDMI, CVBS, SCART and S-Video outputs
• Digital optical 5.1 sound output
• Upscales DVDs to a true 1080p HD video signal
• Compatible with DVD, VCD, SVCD, Audio-CD, CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW
• Multi-region compatible
• Includes full-function remote control
Hope someone else enjoys this bargain!:T

Sorry forgot to say, free delivery as its over £35 and use quidco to get another 5% off!!

Poppycat

Not bad price.

I got one of these this week as they rated very good in reviews ia bit more than Maplins but free delivery and it was quick (3 days for free del)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Philips-DVP5980-Multi-region-capable-Upscaling/dp/B000Q7ZCO6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1206102931&sr=1-1

Wee_Fifer

the philips one is double the size, its the smallness that i liked.

hd cables are at Aldi's next week at £4.99 or currys have them reduced to £7.49 - hope that helps too!
Wee Fifer

NorthCoast

Would this work with a portable hard-drive or is it just compatable with cards?

Poppycat

I know the Philips one works with portable HD although you do need a power source for the HD according to one review I read. The Philips one is quite thin and can easily slide under a small shelve under tv with another device. I mainly got it because I wanted good compatibility and also wanted hdmi. I got my hdmi cable from Ebay for £4.01 inc postage for 2m cable

seth

They are all surprisingly good. The newer ones with HDMI upscaling are faster for operations like fast forward etc which was much slower on the older ones with no HDMI support. This is just due to a faster CPU and better I/O.

The Philips is by far the better of the 2 for quality, I noticed that my local Panasonic shop (in Ealing) has some DivX plater for around £37 but these did not have the card readers or USB.

The Lidl and Aldi Players are also very good but only come around once a year.

Pricewise £39 is average for this type of device, it is worth buying from a high street name like Maplins as returns are easy and with the cheaper units like the Maplins one these tend to fail more often.

There are vouchers for purchases to Maplins I think £3 for a £30 spend just sign up for the newsletter or look on their site.

The memory cards (SD or USB) are great for video podcasts like dl.tv etc as they will play fine.

A word of warning none of these low power, system on a chip players based on the Zoran chips will play the Hi def AVI as they do not have enough power. They will upscale to 1080 etc but only from DVD. If you have a screen less than 50" you will not likely see the difference between a Blu-Ray disk and an well upscales DVD.

Also if you have a next gen console (Xbox 360 or PS3) do not bother with these players as if you update to the latest OFFICIAL firmware you will get DivX and Xvid playback with Hard disk support and USB (for memory stick , SD etc the adapters cost £3 inc postage from DealExtreme) on the 360 you need to try and play a DivX AVI file (like a DL.TV ephisode) while connected to the internet, the 360 will pull down the new codecs for you. Once downloaded you no longer need internet access.

Nice spot and the Amazon deal is also very good.

Just remember if you have a new console, a simple update will give you all this for free.

The DivX / XVid on the 360 is good, DVD upscaling sucks. PS3 is mind blowing for upscaling DVDs not seen the DivX on the PS3 but I've been told its good

The small units travel well and a great for holidays as they play back mpeg video (this is what Digital PVRs generate) no need to encode a DVD, just slap the files onto a DVD disk in data mode these player will read them they run a Linux OS.

Another big difference with these players is the quality of the remote, so check out the remotes (some are really cheap and nasty) if you can and see what works for you.