Video quality over USB port?

[MrSnake]

My DivX files are on an external hard disk and instead of burning them on a rewritable DVDR every time I was thinking of buying a DVD player with a USB port, e.g. Philips DVP5960.

Does anyone have experience with this?
I'm also open for other brands, because Philips isn't exactly my favorite but I've seen so many low budget players (€30-55) that are utterly crap and the few that were actually good didn't have a USB port.

[John]

Thats what I do, I dont have the phillips dvd though, I can watch my divx files ok, but the transfer is to slow to watch any dvd vobs. it just goes slow all the time.

[WingnutNYC]

I have the 5960. The avi files I've played through USB have played very smoothly. As with the previous commenter, vob files and probably mpegs play kind of jerkily, probably because they're bigger.

[Neuron]

I tried Philips 5960 before I finally ended up with JVC TH-C50. I have LaCie "d2" external 320GB HDD and Philips refused to play any DivX or XviD video files from that drive. I were able only view photo files but no any MPEG-4 video. I returned Philips back to the store and purchased JVC TH-C50. I'm very pleased with TH-C50. This HTSIB has USB 2.0 and I have no any issues playing MPEG-4 video from LaCie drive on JVC TH-C50. You have to be aware that Philips' USB is only 1.x compliant and I guess does not work with NTFS formatted drives.

[synchro505]

I also have the Philips DVP5960. It works well for most televisions shows and movies. I watch a lot of documentaries with it. However, when there is a visually complex (higher bit rate?) scene with waterfalls, snow, churning water and some explosions, the playback will stutter. Sometimes I can overcome this by pressing pause for a second and continuing. I put up with this due to the low cost of the machine and the ability to access my USB Seagate 300GB hard drive with all my favorite DiVX files on it. The filing system will bring you back to the DOS days as you can only have eight characters for file and folder names. Since I am on a Mac, I must also use a program called DetoxDiskz to clean up all the hidden files OS X leaves in the directories. For the money, (I paid $69.00USD) the DVP5960 is hard to beat. The DVD end of the machine is great. It never seems to skip even on my 7 year old daughter's most beat up DVDs.