Philips DVP3960/37 Divx + Upscaling / $44 ?

[Dreven7]

I've had a philips 642 for a long time in the living room and a newer version in my gaming room. Today I finally got a big 1080p LCD for the living room and was looking around for an upscalling DVD player with DIVX.

Turns out Walmart has this one (DVP3960/37) for only $44 (HDMI Upscaling / DIVX).

I can find nothing on the Internet (even here) about this player at all. I'm guessing it's the same as the 5960 but without the recording part. Anyway, for $44 you can't go wrong so I'm going to go grab one of them. I'll post back on it but if it is the same as the 5960 I guess there's not much need.

[dun4cheap]

I do find it interesting with all these dvd players offering upscaling. You do realize that all the HDTVs on the market offer upscaling built in.

[jimzcatz]

I do find it interesting with all these dvd players offering upscaling. You do realize that all the HDTVs on the market offer upscaling built in.

Can you please explain this.I have a new plasma hdtv,and my dvds look nothing like the HI-DEF feed from the networks.I have my dvd player connected to the tv with the red/blue/green cable.If I got a dvd player with HDMI,will that do the trick,or do I need a HD-DVD player or BLU-RAY?

[jagabo]

Turns out Walmart has this one (DVP3960/37) for only $44 (HDMI Upscaling / DIVX).

I can find nothing on the Internet (even here) about this player at all. I'm guessing it's the same as the 5960 but without the recording part. Anyway, for $44 you can't go wrong so I'm going to go grab one of them. I'll post back on it but if it is the same as the 5960 I guess there's not much need.

This is probably a case of minor variations and a different model number so Philips can "protect" other retailers from having to price match. Happens all the time. Sounds like a good deal. Let us know how it works out...

[handyguy]

Why do you need upscaling? Dvds are set at 480i tops. upscaling them to 1080 doesn't get you a sharper picture as its just a sort of zoom thing.

[edDV]

I do find it interesting with all these dvd players offering upscaling. You do realize that all the HDTVs on the market offer upscaling built in.

Can you please explain this.I have a new plasma hdtv,and my dvds look nothing like the HI-DEF feed from the networks.I have my dvd player connected to the tv with the red/blue/green cable.If I got a dvd player with HDMI,will that do the trick,or do I need a HD-DVD player or BLU-RAY?

Bottom line, you need HD source to match HD broadcasts. DVD is 720x480 but still looks good upscaled to a point. As said above your HDTV is capable of upscale.

Native progressive HDTV sets (plasma, lcd) must upscale everything to the display panel resolution. If they didn't you would be seeing a small 720x480 rectangle in the center when playing DVD.

The only other issue is whether HDMI/DVI can beat analog component connections for performance. Analog componet as a technology can match or better HDMI and is used widely in television production. However, cheap consumer TV sets and DVD players use cheap analog parts so the digital connection might yield slighty better performance. This will be more important for very large displays. For HDTV display 34" or under you probably won't see much difference. For computer display, VGA is a good solution for those HDTV sets that have one.

[JimBarbasol]

What is the lowest zoom setting on the DVP3960? On my DVP642, it is 1.5 X. If it's 1 X on the DVP3960, I'll buy one.

[jagabo]

What is the lowest zoom setting on the DVP3960? On my DVP642, it is 1.5 X. If it's 1 X on the DVP3960, I'll buy one.

Wouldn't 1x be normal playback (no zoom)?

I don't know about the 3960 but the 5960 has several levels of zoom both in and out. They are labeled 2x, 3x, 4x, 1/2x, 1/3x, and 1/4x but those values aren't accurate.

It's hard to quantify exactly but I estimate it's about 1.4x, 1.7x, and 2.0x for zoom in. And 0.75, 0.50, and 0.33 for zoom out.

But... this works for all AVI files and fullscreen DVDs on a standard definition 4:3 TV (I don't know about the upscaled widescreen outputs). With anamorphic widescreen DVDs the zoom is by the same amounts but the video continues to be letterboxed. So you can't view a widescreen DVD as a pan-and-scan 4:3 DVD.

[JimBarbasol]

Well, maybe on some models. I used a Toshiba DVD/VCR combo deal that had a 1 X zoom and it got rid of the black bars perfectly. Thanks for the reply, jagabo. Have a good weekend.

[aczilla]

This xmas, I decided it was time for my brother to get his own DVP642 so he could stop borrowing mine. My grandmother went to get one as a present, but they were not in stock. Instead, she came home with the DVP3960 which I took home immediately to test out. Please bear with my review because I don't know all of the technical aspects. All I know is what one machine does over another and some codec information, but I will try to be specific.

At first, I thought I was in for a vast improvement over the 642. The 3960 has some nice features to it, but I don't think that anyone giving a positive review of the 3960 on any website has any in-depth experience with the 642. The 642 might have been cursed with a flawed disc motor (a lot of you know what I'm talking about... mine suffers from a disc reading problem as well and will lock up on some discs), but I have gotten used to keeping the lid unscrewed so I can pop the top and touch the white plastic gear to get things moving again because the playability of the machine simply outweighs the annoyance for me. The vast amount of files I could watch more than made up for the flaw, and the flaw itself didn't even arise until two years after I got it. The 3960, on the other hand, has a label on the box saying "king of playability." If there is a battle over such a title, then the 3960 falls short of the 642 in several ways.

Response time: First off, the button response on the machine and the remote control is atrocious. You will find yourself pressing the power button, the disc load button, the play/pause and several more buttons more than once simply to get things moving. To top it off, the disc loading time is much slower than the 642. Depending on the disc and file types, you can find yourself waiting a good thirty seconds to a minute for the menu to appear, whereas the 642 typically takes a fraction of that time. The 3960 also takes slightly longer than the 642 to read the index of each file before it starts playing, and that time varies by the file type.

JPEGs: The 3960 has a nice thumbnail feature for the jpeg menu, and the zoom feature can go up to 200% or back to 50%. Unfortunately, if you use the 3960 then you have to make sure that your disc organizes all of your jpegs into folders. If you just burn the pictures to a DVD or CD as is, then the player only will read about the first 600 files on the disc. I am unsure if this file limitation extends to video files but I wouldn't doubt it, and I also am not sure as of yet if each folder on a disc has a read limit. Nonetheless, the 642 was able to read up to 10,000 image or video files on one disc, and it was limited only by how much you could fit on a DVD, not by how much the player's brain could read.

Video files: Perhaps the greatest benefit of the DVP3960 is its faster ability to fast-forward/rewind through individual video. The DVP642 only went up to 8x speed, but the DVP3960 goes to a whopping 32x. A lot of the same standards of video play apply to the 3960 as with the 642. DVDs play wonderfully on both players, and I wouldn't expect any less. Both also cannot play files using the xvid1.0 codec, wma, flv, mov, mkv, and omg. The 3960, however, has the ability to play a few file types that cause the 642 to freeze up. The most common current encoding type I have heard of (and use for making my own back up discs) is an XVID 1.1 or higher configuration (1.2 seems to be the most common for HDTV recordings). Recently, my DVP642 ran into a problem playing files that were encoded with an XVID ISO MPEG4 configuration that used a multipart OpenDML (I'm no expert on file types and not trying to look smart in the least in describing this, but this was the information I got on GSpot when checking the files, and a standard OpenDML AVI 2.0 of the same file plays fine on both players... my own home video encodes use the standard OpenDML AVI2.0 as well, but I use a Divx style packed bitstream). The DVP3960 can play these files, so it wins on playability there. The one current codec upgrade, however, doesn't begin to outweigh the drawback it has in older files.

I originally bought the DVP642 to play specific AVI files. These files were encoded VHS transfer backups from between 2001 and 2003 that used an MP42 codec (S-MPEG 4 Version 2). Although this codec caused some artifacting in picture and is sorely outdated, the files play just fine on the DVP642. The DVP3960, however, gives an unsupported codec error and only plays the audio. It doesn't speak in the newer model's favor not to be compatible with files its predecessor could play.

All in all, the DVP3960 is a decent little player, but not decent enough compared to the 642. Simply put, the bells and whistles of the 3960 just don't make good harmony. I can't in good conscience recommend this model to anyone who has access to an older DVP642 because the 642 has been and remains the best stand alone Divx player I have ever used, despite its flaws. I am keeping the DVP3960 as a backup player for commercial DVDs to avoid the motor freeze ups my old player encounters sometimes, but my preference for playing DIVX, XVID, and AVI files remains loyal to the DVP642. Were I to need a replacement player, I would pay the same amount I paid a few years ago for another DVP642 before I paid half that for the newer DVP3960.

[Krispy Kritter]

You may want to look into a newer model such as the DVP5982.

Also note that you can still get the DVP642, however, the model currently for sale is different than the original (there are several posts here covering the differences between the two and the issues with the new model).

[jman98]

A few comments on aczilla's post.

Xvid versions aren't a problem for playback on the DVP-642. The REAL problem is encoding options like packed bit stream. I strongly suspect that the Xvid files your DVP-642 won't play have packed bit stream. Gspot can tell you this, but you may not know where to look. Newer Philips DVD players that support Divx have a different Divx playback chip than the old DVP-642 and they generally support packed bit stream.

The DVP-642 is the only Philips player I know of that will touch MP4 containers and encoded files. I'm not surprised that the DVP-3960 won't play these. Again, this has to do with the Divx playback chip, which actually is a badly outdated, inferior chip on the old DVP-642. I'm sure the lack of MP4 playback on the newer player is a nuisance, but that's just about the only good thing about the old chip the DVP-642 used and may still use for all I know. That chip also did some Divx playback scaling of widescreen video that was stretched too much in the vertical direction, although that was a little hard to spot. That certainly wasn't a good thing.

[MJA]

just get the DVP5960 for $54 + freeshipping from buy.com

http://www.buy.com/prod/philips-dvp5960-hdmi-dvd-up-converter-player/q/loc/111/202786567.html