Philips 642 - a fast forward/rewind solution

[Zisguy1]

This problem dogged me quite awhile after receiving my Philips DVP642-37 with 1109 firmware. Some DivX's burned on CD-R(W) could ffw/rew, and sometimes not... for the life of me I couldn't figure out why, as there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it. Yes, I was finalizing my discs and using the right file system.

After wasting a lot of time, energy and discs I finally found a solution. It seems the 642 is very sensitive to disc quality, and determines whether it can ffw/rew AVI files based on some unknown quality metric (possibly related to the leadout groove). Most CD-R's made these days are crappy, and this is likely part of the problem.

The solution (at least with CD-R's) is to create a small (around 1MB) AVI file, and burn it last on the disc, after the main movie. When I started doing this, all DivX's ffw/rew just fine now. I'd encourage anyone experiencing this problem to give it a try. If you can't find a tiny AVI file, try an MP3 or something instead.

Not sure if this works with DVD recordables or not, but it might.

[MessiaH289]

I've also experienced this problem with my DVP642/37.

I've also had best results writing at 8x with Nero Express.

I wrote at 48x before, and the player would freeze halfway through the video, and say Disc Error, as well as some small playback problems throughout the video.

Using 4x I had a RW/FF problem as well as some A/V sync problems, so then I did 8x and no problems what-so-ever.

The player is very sensitive to the discs as you've mentioned.

[Zisguy1]

For some reason trying different burning methods hasn't worked for me, but putting an extra file at the end works 100%. Probably the player has the most probs reading right at the end of the disc.