SONY RDR-HX725 - DivX or not?

[WookieeMonster]

Hi all.

I just bought myself a Sony RDR-HX725 from eBuyer, and am curious about playing DivX videos on it.

All of the reviews and details I've read on the web say that it plays DivX, but there's nothing in the manual about it.

Can it play DivX, and if so, how?

Many thanks.

[T Bear]

The RDR HX725 will play DivX discs, but I can find no way of getting the machine to play the disc so the picture covers the full width of the tv screen. Put simply, it plays widescreen DivX films so that it looks like you've zoomed out by 25%.

Since the machine has no zoom function (an absolute disaster on the part of Sony since every DVD player or recorder I've ever owned or used has had one), you can't zoom in to make the picture bigger. And of course as DivX is a fixed screen size and isn't DVD, you can't go to 16:9 on your player to change the picture size either.

It's a shame Sony have missed off such a basic function on what seems to otherwise be a decent machine.

It also won't convert NTSC to Quasi PAL, so even if you can crack the region coding, you need an NTSC compatible tv to watch R1 discs. But then I don't think any Sony DVD machine has ever done that.

[WookieeMonster]

Thanks for the info. But how do you actually get it to play the DivX files? Should it just be a case of dumping the files from the PC onto a DVD-R and inserting the disc in the machine?

If so, I've tried that, and it doesn't work. Any info much appreciated, as I'm getting a bit tired of sitting at my PC to watch things, and if I burn them as a 'proper' DVD, the sound gets significantly out of synch 9 times out of 10.