Which player should I buy?

[Gilliland]

Last night I bought a new JVC 900 player, thinking that it would be a good choice to play as many formats as possible - DVD, VCD, SVCD, DVD-Audio, CD, and all of the various R/RW versions.

But the first homemade disc that I tried to play failed. The player recognized it fine, showed the menu correctly, and played both the audio and video, but the presentation skipped/stuttered so that it seemed to run at about 2/3 of normal speed and had tiny frequent gaps in the audio.

The same disc plays fine on two different computers and also played fine on a portable DVD player that I tried out at Best Buy. But it won't play correctly on this new JVC unit.

Obviously, there is something about the encoding that the JVC doesn't like, and I suspect that I could recode this video so that it would play correctly if I tried enough variations, but shouldn't a high end player like this handle a wide variety of different encoding techniques?

So I guess I'm wondering two things: Should I return the JVC unit to the store, and if so, what player will give me the best compatibility with a wide variety of +R formats.

I should add that I'd also like a player that (like the JVC) that can handle CDROMs with MP3 audio and/or JPEG slide shows. It seems like more and more modern players are offering that these days, so that shouldn't limit me too much.

Any thoughts?

[REDi]

i'm in the market for a player.. mainly for dvd/vcd/svcd. From what i've read, both the JVC s300 and s500 play pretty much anything. the only downside of the JVC players (from what I've read) is that they are slow at displaying jpegs. the jvc s500 has progressive scan and optical output, while the s300 doesn't. Here (in toronto) the s500 is $100 more than the s300).

[REDi]

hmm now that i think about it.. i'm guessin since your vcd won't play in your 900, it probably won't play in the 300 or 500 either. I'd try your disc out on a different brand of standalone player. i'm assuming from your post taht you are using a dvd+r, which I have no experience with. Post what software and media you used and hopefully someone else can suggest something.

[Gilliland]

Yeah, I doubt that the 300 or the 500 (or for that matter the new 600, coming out later this month) will behave any differently than the 900.

I've already had some discussions about the authoring and such in a thread in another forum. Now I'm just trying to figure out what player is a likely candidate. So far, I'm leaning toward the Philips 724.

[epo]

I'm quite lucky owner of 302. Plays nearly everything I have thrown at it (VCD,SVCD(on CD-R and RW),MP-3,DVD-R,DVD-RW). Has problems with old (Gen2) cheapos only.

[Verbatim]

WAIT! the next wave of DCD players will be playing Divx true they have been push back but it will be woth the wait. If that means zero to you there are tons of good DVD players out there now.

[REDi]

yup there's one european company (think they're called Kiss) which has just released a DivX compatible player. would be pretty cool to have a nice 720x480 divx rip on one CD

[Verbatim]

yup there's one european company (think they're called Kiss) which has just released a DivX compatible player. would be pretty cool to have a nice 720x480 divx rip on one CD

could have region problems with it so wait for the US versions.