Philips DVP642 Stupid Questions

[CorranHorn]

I know there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers but I have a couple quick questions after buying the DVP642. I did attempt to look through the site and the forums for these answers first, but my research came up empty after going through all sorts of info on general firmware updates and region free hacks.

1.) Is there a way to power off the unit, without pulling the plug? When I "turn off" the unit, the standby light remains on, which I think is ridiculous. Why do I need my DVD player to be in a standby mode, shouldn't it just be On or Off? I tried disabling the "Smart Power" feature, which the manual indicated would do the trick, but alas it didn't.

2.) Is there a way to "zoom out" of divx files? I have several files which were encoded at a low resolution, so they do not get displayed at full screen, instead just as a centered image commonly 1/2 to 2/3 of full screen. However I have several files which were encoded at a higher resolution and at a very high compression rate. This makes viewing the hi-res files very difficult to watch, so I was wondering if it's possible to zoom out of these files to get the same display as the low-res files and perhaps hide some of the compression distortion. The manual had no info there and attempts to change the aspect ratio came up with no results.

Any help that could be given would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!

[Junpei]

1.) "Smart Power" just means the unit will turn "Off" (Standby mode) after a period of inactivity. It seems more and more electronics are doing this. My PS2 and digital speaker system both do the same (though they also both have physical off switches). I doubt the unit uses much power in this mode and was designed to work like this.

2.) If the picture doesn't fill the screen, the player does have a zoom IN feature. But not zoom out. I don't understand what you mean about hi-res files being difficult to watch. It sounds like you're describing something different from a zoom in/out function.

[CorranHorn]

1.) "Smart Power" just means the unit will turn "Off" (Standby mode) after a period of inactivity. It seems more and more electronics are doing this. My PS2 and digital speaker system both do the same (though they also both have physical off switches). I doubt the unit uses much power in this mode and was designed to work like this.

Thanks for replying, I appreciate it. I've noticed the same thing with my PS2 as well, but as it does have a physical switch I just shut it off. This isn't really a big issue, it just strikes me as odd that this would be the case, plus the bright red LED is annoying. I guess some duct tape over it will do the trick :P

2.) If the picture doesn't fill the screen, the player does have a zoom IN feature. But not zoom out. I don't understand what you mean about hi-res files being difficult to watch. It sounds like you're describing something different from a zoom in/out function.

The viewable size of the videos are 512x368 but they are highly compressed, so there's quite a lot of distortion to them when viewed at full screen, which is how the DVP642 displays them automatically. I had hoped since the DVP642 was playing some videos at screen sizes less than full, there would be a way to make it do so manually so you could view the video without the distortion. Again not a huge issue, but it would have been a nice feature to have.

Cheers!

[roos50]

The "stand-by" means that although the unit is technically off and not running it still has some power supply so if you pick up your remote and push the ON button, the unit recieves the remote's signal + turns on without you having to get off the couch.

Most remote controlled appliances have this. Depending upon the brand + type some draw more power than others. Some draw excessively more.
If youre not worried about the power, then yep, tape up the red light.

[Junpei]

The "stand-by" means that although the unit is technically off and not running it still has some power supply so if you pick up your remote and push the ON button, the unit recieves the remote's signal + turns on without you having to get off the couch.

I was thinking the same thing though I didn't mention it in my above post. Don't all TV's do the same then? They just don't have any lights to indicate.

I see what you mean about zooming out now. Hmm, I do wish the player had some sort of zoom out, on my old TV it would be hard to watch some subtitled files (usually with the text encoded in the video) because of the TV's huge over-scan (my new HDTV has less so I haven't seen it be a problem yet, not to mention the sides of 4:3 videos don't get cut off anyway since they don't fill the 16:9 screen).

[giannid]

When he's talking hi-res high compression, I think he means that he has a low bitrate lo-quality video which was encoded with larger dimensions. Therefore he would like to be able to zoom out.

The first DVD player I bought had the ability to zoom out. It was a no name brand, and I thought this was a great feature. I don't know why Philips (and most others) doesn't have this feature.

The only advice I could say is that if you have a smaller TV, like a 14", then you might try to watch these files on that.

If you know how to work Virtualdub or Virtualdubmod, you can also recode some of your files putting black bars around it. Your larger dimensioned files would have to be resized first. To put black bars around it, open the file in Virtualdub, then select the resize filter: Video-->Filters-->Add-->Resize.

Choose your new width and height (you might want to keep these the same as they were before. Use Gspot to find original height and width) or you can use something like standard VCD dimensions: 352x240.

Then you need to tick the box "Expand Frame and Letterbox Image" and fill in the boxes. You might choose 640x480. This will put a black frame around your video so that the DVD won't automatically expand the small video to the fullscreen.

Then you need to recode your video applying these new dimensions and borders: Video-->Compressoin (choose xvid or divx)

Configure (select target bitrate - You can get the original video bitrate from Gspot analysis of your original file)

Save file and give a different name than original
File-->Save as AVI

And that should work.