Philips DVP 5960, compatible USB Key List

[nailz385]

Hey guys trying to figure something out and came across this site and found some useful information but still not exactly what i am looking for, hoping you guys can help. Anyway I work at Best Buy and noticed the 5960/37 had a USB port so I decided to try my PNY 1GB on it to see if it would play DivX from it since none of my coworkers knew. I set up our display player and plugged it in, worked awesome! So naturally I bought one got it home and set it up and was all excited to watch some Lost, plugged in the drive and all i get is "Device not supported." Not cool, at all. I've been scouring the internet for some info on this and all I can come up with is maybe the firmware on the display model is the older version. I checked mine and it has the newest firmware available from Philips. Now what I am wondering is if it is older firmware on the display unit why would they have removed this feature on the new firmware? The only thing I can think of is to download the firmware update and set that up on the display and see if my USB drive will then work on it. If so then it/s my DVD player, if not then it's the new firmware. This is of course all assuming that the display has old firmware, if it too has the new firmware then I am at a loss as to why it will work on the display and not mine, any thoughts? suggestions? comments? anything at all would be appreciated!

[phunkyfish]

Hey guys trying to figure something out and came across this site and found some useful information but still not exactly what i am looking for, hoping you guys can help. Anyway I work at Best Buy and noticed the 5960/37 had a USB port so I decided to try my PNY 1GB on it to see if it would play DivX from it since none of my coworkers knew. I set up our display player and plugged it in, worked awesome! So naturally I bought one got it home and set it up and was all excited to watch some Lost, plugged in the drive and all i get is "Device not supported." Not cool, at all. I've been scouring the internet for some info on this and all I can come up with is maybe the firmware on the display model is the older version. I checked mine and it has the newest firmware available from Philips. Now what I am wondering is if it is older firmware on the display unit why would they have removed this feature on the new firmware? The only thing I can think of is to download the firmware update and set that up on the display and see if my USB drive will then work on it. If so then it/s my DVD player, if not then it's the new firmware. This is of course all assuming that the display has old firmware, if it too has the new firmware then I am at a loss as to why it will work on the display and not mine, any thoughts? suggestions? comments? anything at all would be appreciated!

I have a 1GB PNY key and it works just fine. You'll see it listed on my page: http://www.phunkyfish.com/article/4/philips-dvp-596012

You might try one of the firmware updates on the page on your player. I'd recommend the /37 firmware from wireless2104 with Packed Bitstream support. Unless your using HDMI this is a good firmware to use as it helps stuttering video....

[nailz385]

Is the fimware going to help the player recognize the USB key? b/c I can't get video at all to know if stuttering video is any issue

[phunkyfish]

Is the fimware going to help the player recognize the USB key? b/c I can't get video at all to know if stuttering video is any issue

All I know is that my 1GB PNY Key works and I'm on the latest firmware. U could even try one of the other listed keys on my page. I'm sure they sell some of the other ones at best buy for fairly cheap. You could also try returning your player for the display one if the firmware upgrade works on the display model? You may just have a faulty unit?

[nailz385]

Yeah most of my questions should be answered tomorrow i hope. Still super annoying to do all this, damn philips! I'll let you guys know what happens

[Flatart]

I am a newbie here, hoping to learn a lot more than I am presently able to return, but I wanted to recount my experience with the Philips DVP-5960/37 and hard drives. I bought the DVP-5960/37 on eBay for $100 shipped. The region hack given elsewhere works like a dream on everything I have tried in it. (I had a Toshiba SD-4900 which worked with a simple hack but it fails on multi-episode DVD's.)

I bought a Fantom 120 Gb USB2 drive for $30 (after rebate) from Buy.com. It came pre-formatted for FAT32. I filled it with .avi files (and I do mean filled; about 130 of them). The DVP-5960/37 plays almost every one. Occasionally, it does not have the ability to decode the video or (once) audio data and delivers a message to that effect, but it seems to handle the vast majority of DivX and Xvid encoding.

The "stuttering" problem mentioned here as regards "snow" is true with both the video of the .avi having many discreet bright patches (an animation with lots of rain) and the audio track of an .avi file having with many high-frequency notes (chimes). The stuttering is the drive re-reading the data, clearly evidenced by the drive light flicker; it can be stopped by pausing and re-starting, but the stutter returns when the drive begins to have to re-read the data again.

A little experimentation with the audio track version of this problem revealed that another person's encoding of the same audio stuttering scene was stutter-free. The stutter is not the fault of the DVP-5960 but the encoding is erroneous, probably blowing out some data value and causing the re-reads by the drive.

Obviously, the fact that the drive has to have its own power supply to be used on the DVP-5960 contributes to the difficulties people are having with flash drives and other tiny devices which will only hold one high-rez version of a 120-minute .avi file and many of which cost more than I paid for a 120 Gb drive. Get yourself an inexpensive HD and have a "video jukebox"!

The DVP-5960 has some limitations -- it seems it will not scale down an .avi file encoded at a width greater than the screen resolution you are running in to the lower screen resolution, or at least that's the error message I get with extremely wide .avi's. I'm also disappointed with the HDMI "upscaling" which refuses to go above 480p on a HDTV capable of higher resolution, and frankly the DVP-5960's 480p image is inferior (washed out) to the YPbPr image. OK, I'm quibbling, because it's a pretty great image either way.

Another quirk of the way in which the DVP-5960 reads the file directory is that its file kernel has no sorting ability. If you drag an alphabetical listing of files from your computer onto the drive and they appear in its directory to be in the same order as your computer (when attached to your computer), you may discover than when you transplant the hard drive unit to the DVP-5960, those files are in another and seemingly random order; it takes the files in the order they were written to your computer's hard drive as its order regardless of how you wrote them to the drive.

So, it's necessary to drag EACH file over to the hard drive, one at a time, in the order you want it to be listed in for that order to be preserved in the DVP-5960's directory! This will avoid having items in partfiles being listed "part 2, part 1, part 3." (The DVP-5960 will play each item in a file list without pausing, so partfiles cause only a slight pause.)

I'm still enjoying experimenting with its quirks, but in general I find the USB capability to have turned out to be the most useful and enjoyable feature of the unit. I love the idea of a video jukebox!

[bdjuf]

...

[phunkyfish]

No, there are solutions for viewing a DVD but not for viewing filenames over USB...

[jmikeh]

Corsair Flash Voyager 1GB thumbdrive does not work in the philips 5960/37. This the blue and black model. I have not tried the new GT model but suspect it will not work as well.
When plugged in it says device not supported and I believe it's because of the Corsair's higher power requirements from the USB port. That is what I have heard in other posts about it.

[phunkyfish]

Corsair Flash Voyager 1GB thumbdrive does not work in the philips 5960/37. This the blue and black model. I have not tried the new GT model but suspect it will not work as well.
When plugged in it says device not supported and I believe it's because of the Corsair's higher power requirements from the USB port. That is what I have heard in other posts about it.

I'm of the same opinion. I own several voyager drives and was quite annoyed when I first discovered they did not work i the player.

[jmikeh]

Corsair Flash Voyager 1GB thumbdrive does not work in the philips 5960/37. This the blue and black model. I have not tried the new GT model but suspect it will not work as well.
When plugged in it says device not supported and I believe it's because of the Corsair's higher power requirements from the USB port. That is what I have heard in other posts about it.

I'm of the same opinion. I own several voyager drives and was quite annoyed when I first discovered they did not work i the player.

I love my Corsair. I bought a cheap Sandisk micro 1GB for my divx files. It works flawlessly as others have noted.

I also have a cheap Lexar SD/XD card reader that works fine in the 5960. I have tried SD and xD cards with it.
http://www.lexar.com/readers/trio.html

[A_T]

Dane Elec Zlight 4GB drive works fine.

[phunkyfish]

Corsair Flash Voyager 1GB thumbdrive does not work in the philips 5960/37. This the blue and black model. I have not tried the new GT model but suspect it will not work as well.
When plugged in it says device not supported and I believe it's because of the Corsair's higher power requirements from the USB port. That is what I have heard in other posts about it.

I'm of the same opinion. I own several voyager drives and was quite annoyed when I first discovered they did not work i the player.

I love my Corsair. I bought a cheap Sandisk micro 1GB for my divx files. It works flawlessly as others have noted.

I also have a cheap Lexar SD/XD card reader that works fine in the 5960. I have tried SD and xD cards with it.
http://www.lexar.com/readers/trio.html

Interestingly the 8GB and 16GB Corsair Flash Voyager drives work...

[phunkyfish]

Please only post working external HDD's if they work without a power source. All HDD's should work with a power source if formatted correctly...

[ThaDraGun]

I just bought a OCZ 2GB Rally 2 (Dual Channel) Flash Memory Drive USB 2.0 and it DOES work.

At first I thought it didnt work, but you have to really shove it in there for it to go in right. I put it in and the light did turn on but it wouldnt work at first.. Seemed like if I pushed any harder I would have broke it, but I tried again and it really jammed it in there and it did work.

[kiloscott]

Hey, Phunky,

Great thread. Great site.

Connect3D 2gb Pocket Drive (rebadged Samsung Mighty Drive) works very well. Kingston Data Traveler I 2gb (the green one) works but is extremely slow. Searching a long avi file takes ages. The Connect3D is about as fast as a DVD-R in the unit's drive tray. This would seem to be the result of the Connect3D's far superior seek time. Maybe the list of working flash drives could be expanded to include figures for seek time, read speed and write speed for each drive. Had I known the Kingston was so slow, I would not have bought it. For some reason manufacturers don't publish all these figures, due to variations in flash memory from batch to batch would be my guess.

Thanks,

Scott

[jerome.deville]

LaCie Mobile Drive
Hi-Speed USB 2.0
120GB

Working Ok but you have to use the external power alimentation

[azuberi80]

Does anyone know if a SimpleTech external drive will work without a power supply? (I'm talking about the small portable ones that dont come with an external power supply?)

[capa]

Just bought one of these:

8GB USB 2.0 FLASH STICK PEN DRIVE SAMSUNG MEMORY 8 GB

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260191535614&ssPageName=MERC_VIC_..._promot_widget

I'll post if it works when it arrives.

[Tomguy]

Just got back from Walmart.

Bought the

Western Digital WDH1U3200N 320GB My Book Essential Edition USB External Hard Drive -Energy Star Compliant
www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=8245856
$79.88

to format for use with Philips DVP5960/37.

GREAT! Did a quick test and connected it to the DVP. It worked, right out of the box. It is already formatted at FAT32. True Plug & Play for the DVP5960/37.