Philips DVP5960 and USB

[yoedba]

I know this has been mentioned before but i thought i'd ask before i give up. Just bought the 80 gig ipod video and cant get the dvd to recognize it even in disk mode. Anyone have any ideas? It is fat32....
Thanks....

[seshsud]

I am trying to get my Maxtor One Touch External Hard Drive (60GB) recognized by this player but I am tired of seeing Device not supported message.
Note:
a) this hard drive does not have external power.
b) I formatted it to a FAT32 drive (with SWISSKNIFE) and made it the primary partition,didn't work
c) used the dos program (found the link on this thread) to make it a FAT32 partition, didnt work

Some tech specs of this player:
Version: 37.06.42.18
SUB_VER: 00.00.03.08
8032: 05.00.06.05
Servo: 89.05.20.00
RISC: 05.00.06.05
DSP: 07.03.00.53

What should I do to get my portable external hard drive recongized?
a) Do a firmware upgrade on the DVD Player?
b) Do something to make Windows recognize it as a "Removable Drive" which hopefully will then be recogonized?
c) Connect an external power supply to this hard drive because th epower output from the player may not be sufficient to turn this on?

Please help!I have tried suggestions in this thread for over 4 hours last night,but in vain

[TBoneit]

Most likely not enough power. I had zero luck with USB only powered external drives. IOWs a laptop drive in a external case. OTOH I suspect that those really small thumb drives that use the matchbook size drives, as used in IPODs, might work as they are very low power.

I have had good luck with generic powered cases, ME320, using 40 or 80 GB drives. Excluding the one where it turned out the drive was failing. Replacing that drive and it worked too.

[l3igl3ang]

Hi could any one tell me if this dvd player has playback? like when u stop the dvd turn off the power and play it again later it resumes were it left off or when u swap dvds out and then put them back in and resume were it left off? cause i bought a rca dvd player with hdmi and as soon as it powers off i got to start the dvd all way back from the front and that gets really annoying as to my ponnier dvd player no hdmi it will resume even if the dvd is tooken out of the player

[jagabo]

Hi could any one tell me if this dvd player has playback? like when u stop the dvd turn off the power and play it again later it resumes were it left off or when u swap dvds out and then put them back in and resume were it left off?

No, it doesn't have that feature.

[johnnyboy]

Hello Everybody

I am a newcomer in this forum and would like to thank you all for your findings and would like to share mine as well.

1) my solution for smooth play with an USB HD
-------------------------------------------------------
I have made some tests to find why the videos on usb port has this annoying stuttering every 10-15 secs when i play an avi from a harddrive and NOT from a multicard reader (i-rocks IR-5200 ) with my pqi high-speed 100 1 Gb Compact flash plugged. The same avi file would play fine on CF and stutter on the harddrive. I noticed that my drives where all with 8megs of buffer and that a CF has none (if i am right) So the funny thing is that it should play better on the HD than the CF but it is the exact opposit, i so supposed a lack of "intelligent USB disk buffer management" from the DVP5960 like somebody said before (read ahead buffering problem) Then i saw that somebody (sorry for forgetting the names) was happy with a WD passeport 120Gb 2,5" wich has a... 2Mb buffer!!
I so jumped on some old 2,5" HD with 2Mb cache: Toshiba MK6021GAS, 60Gb, 4200RPM, UDMA100. format it in one FAT32 primary partition, copy the avi and... perrfect smooooothhh plaaaaaaay yeaaaah :P finally! I then have tested again the 2Mb buffer trick with a Fujitsu MHT2060AT, 60Gb and same result came out: smooth play.
So it might even work better with a 512K buffer drive

My discoveries for powering a 2.5" usb drive with the DVP5960 USB plug only
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have first plugged my 120 Gb 2.5"HM120JC (snow white color stiker) samsung drive date of manufacture: january 2007 in an ARGOSY HD260 enclosure (the best for me) my wich have spinned well as they are very nicely designed to use little portion of amperage of the USB bus. But the same model (vanilla white colour sticker) dated June 2006 did not spin. Then while testing noticed that he finaly spinned but only with a very short usb cable, with a thick section and no ferrite filters wich seems to drain a tiny fraction of current. So if you take care of using the thickest and shortest cable with no ferrite on it and have a HD with a max of 0.8 Ampers of consumption or better, bellow amperage, you maybe will be abble to make your 2,5" drive work with no external power supply.

I hope this will help
Seeya
jb

[Squash]

@l3igl3ang,

To elaborate on Jagabo's reply, it does and it doesn't, depending on what you're watching. The 5960/37 does support "resume play" if you're playing normal DVDs (page 26 of the manual). Quote: "Resume playback of the last 5 discs is possible, even if the disc was ejected or the power switched off."

When you turn on the player, after the "Philips" logo finishes displaying, the word "Load" will display for several seconds. If you hit the "Play" button during this "Load" display, playback will resume from the point last watched (it will say "Resume Play" on your TV while it loads). According to the manual, this works for the last 5 discs played. I've only used it to resume the last disc I was watching, and it works fine for that.

However, it does NOT support resume play if you're watching an avi/divx file from a disc full of them (at least I haven't been able to get it to). It just goes to the menu instead.

It does have up to 32X fast-forward, though, which will get you where you need to go pretty quick.

[jagabo]

When you turn on the player, after the "Philips" logo finishes displaying, the word "Load" will display for several seconds. If you hit the "Play" button during this "Load" display, playback will resume from the point last watched

Thanks Squash, I didn't know that. What a well hidden feature!

[slythe]

I hooked up an WD external hard drive to my dvp5960 and it brings up the list of files on the drive correctly, but won't play any of them. They are all divx avi's. When I hit "play" or "ok," it pauses for a second and nothing happens. Anyone know what the problem is here? The drive is formatted fat32.

[Neuron]

I hooked up an WD external hard drive to my dvp5960 and it brings up the list of files on the drive correctly, but won't play any of them. ....

When I had chance to test run this player absolutely the same things happened to me.
Phil 5960 refused to play any of the DivX or XviD video files from my external HDD. Same thing - showed list of files and that was it. And BTW - my HDD formatted as NTFS. I think Philips' USB 1.x suffers big time. I've got finally JVC TH-C50 and this HTIB unit has USB 2.0.
JVC friendly recognized my HDD from the first sight and has no issues playing back DivX video from that drive via its USB port.

[slythe]

I hooked up an WD external hard drive to my dvp5960 and it brings up the list of files on the drive correctly, but won't play any of them. ....

When I had chance to test run this player absolutely the same things happened to me.
Same thing - showed list of files and that was it.

Ok I solved this problem. Neither the standard windows formatting nor Partition Magic seem to format a drive correctly so that it works with a 5960. My drive was formatted fat32 with Partition Magic, so it was recognized by the player but none of the movies would play.

Then I reformatted the drive using Swissknife (linked to earlier in the thread), again to fat32, and it worked. I don't know why, but Swissknife appears to be the key here.

[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!
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!

[TequilaMockingbird]

Hi,

I just bought this dvd player yesterday, after reading most of this thread.

Registered here just to add my external drive experiences

My player came with latest firmware (37.06.42.29)

I have a Seagate 250gb/7200 rpm drive in a Vantec NexStar 3 enclosure. I reformatted to Fat32 with Swissknife as suggested here, loaded some avi files and plugged it into dvd player.

It recognized and played all the files with no problems.

Cheers

[tikigod19]

hi guys i have a quick question..

I have a 1gb Dabbs value USB pen drive that works fine with my DVP5960. Does this mean that if I buy a 4gb version of the same pen drive that will also work? Or does it require something else when you go up to 4gb?

Any help would be appreciated.
David

[ScottY_]

Thinking of buying one of these just a quick question, how good is the Up-scaling through HDMI? I have a 32" Evesham HDTV, supporting upto 1080i.

Thnx

[TBoneit]

From reports here the upscaling is not that good.

I connect through Component set to progressive and it looks good to me. If I hit the fill button on my TV sets remote it fills the screen side to side but of course then people look a little squat.

If you are wanting to upscale with quality upscaling then get an $200 or so Oppo. You can get more details here by doing a search of messages and the DVD players reviews over along the left side. The Phillips is what it is, inexpensive.

Pros:
USB works for me with flashdrives and FAT32 formatted hard disk drives.
Plays most anything XVID/Divx, MPG, JPG
Plays +R DLs burned in my Lite-On with Nero 6.6
Region free can be set from the remote
outputs PAL or NTSC as NTSC in my case, Most likely the reverse in the UK. Or can output either depending on disc format.
Utra Divx Certified. I can author Ultra Divx with chapter and Menus and they work good.

Cons:
Poor upscaling, Surprise?, for the cost not unexpected.
Remote not very sensative.
Not a lot of functions on the remote comared to a Toshiba Divx player I have. Note that the Toshiba doesn't play things the Phillips will play. Also no USB on the Toshiba.

Bottom line for me it does what I wanted at a price I could afford. I may even run out and get another one and make this one a spare.

Hope this helps?

Cheers
Roger T

[VidJunkie]

I have owned a DVP5960 for over a year, here is what I have learned:

The upscaling only works on the HDMI output, and I can definitely see a significant improvement in the display quality. It is as good as more expensive units? I don't know because I don't have an expensive unit to compare.

The USB port won't supply enough power for 2.5" HDDs, you will need to power the drive separately - I use a USB cable that has a short power only "pig-tail" on one end. It can be plugged into a powered USB hub. I have an HD-DVR from the cable company with a USB port on the front. Although the USB port is not active, it does have power! So for me, the power problem was solved very easily because the HD-DVR is right above the DVP5960.

The USB port works well with USB 2.0 memory sticks, flash drives, jump drives, thumb drives etc. power is not an issue since these all use Flash memory which requires little power.

I believe that any 3.5" HDD with external power should work just fine, so long as it is formatted FAT32 (Swissknife worked for my 2.5" HDD).

The DVP5960 will recognize and play many file formats (.avi, .mpg, .vob, ...) but even though the unit can upscale to HD resolution, it WILL NOT accept a video file with a 720p resolution. You will get "Resolution not supported" if you try to play a true 720p video file.

Hope this helps...
-john

[spin54]

Hey, I just got my DVP5960 yesterday and thought i'd share my experiences so far.

First, I am running it into an LG 50" Plasma upscaling it to 1080i through HDMI and dvd look pretty good IMO.

I have been playing with the usb function and so far I have tried my 512 usb Micro Cruzer thumb drive. It is formatted as FAT. Not FAT32, just plain FAT. I played a tv show format avi and it played without flaw. Not a hiccup anywhere. It also looked pretty freakin good.

Next I tried an external HDD through one of theres...
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=2020-OTB&cpc=SCH
with external power with 2 partitions both formatted NTFS. That obviously didn't work.

So next I found this page with this AMAZINGLY simple command line exe.
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/
go to fat32 formatter and follow directions.

It allows you to format pretty much any size hdd into a fat32 file system.

So I unallocated my partitions and made them one partition again, though i'm sure I could have kept both my 80gb partitions and made them each fat32 or whatever I wanted, but I made them one big 160gb partition and then used the fat32 formatter and made it one big FAT32 160gb external usb HDD.

I loaded up some tv shows on it (actually the whole 3rd season of ER) in .avi format and plugged it into the dvd player. SMOOTH as could be. No problems whatsoever. Sound is in sync. No stuttering at all. Very clear picture. I would say near HD quality look although the shows aren't 720p quality. But they sure look it on the plasma.

The hdd I used is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ATA IDE 160gb 8mb cache.

So i'm VERY happy about that. The fat32 formatter was JUST what I was looking for. And it only took about a second to do it. Maybe a total of a minute to get it all done form NTFS to FAT32.

Next I tried a 2GB Sandisk SD card that I stole out of my Wii with a 9 in 1 card reader. The SD card is formatted FAT32. I tested the speed of it and it seems to transfer at 20x. I loaded 2 tv shows onto it and plugged it in with the card reader. Again, smooth as KY Jelly.

So I think it just needs the right formatting. Chache size might come into play, but with my 8mb cache on my hdd, it seems to run perfect still, so I don't know.

NOW, I do have a problem. When i'm playing a video file through the usb port, and I pause it, eventually the whole dvd player just shuts off. I lose my place in the video and have to start clear over and fast forward through a bunch to get back to where I was.

My question is, does anyone know how the hell to make it stop turning off? It's starting to make me angry.

Other than that, I love this dvd player.

[TBoneit]

Nope, I never found a way. My end (Workaround) solution is to do all my new encodes as UltraDivx with chapters and menus. That way I can get back where I was pretty easy.

It will Resume playback on a True DVD in the DVD drive. Something like pressing play while the screen displays loading or some such.

[slr_65]

I'm going crosseyed trying to read all these posts, so I thought I'd just ask my question . . . if I rip a DVD to a folder on an external hard drive and then plug that (properly formatted hd) into this player will it allow me to open that folder and play the video content?

i.e. what I'm asking is can I open a standard DVD format video on the hard drive . . . kinda like using PowerDVD on a pc, or do I have to convert to Divx?

[jagabo]

I'm going crosseyed trying to read all these posts, so I thought I'd just ask my question . . . if I rip a DVD to a folder on an external hard drive and then plug that (properly formatted hd) into this player will it allow me to open that folder and play the video content?

i.e. what I'm asking is can I open a standard DVD format video on the hard drive . . . kinda like using PowerDVD on a pc, or do I have to convert to Divx?

Not really. The bitrate will usually be too high to play smoothly.

When the bitrate is low enough you can play the VOB files but you won't get menus and stuff.

[bdjuf]

...

[jagabo]

Guys, any way to improve the display menu of the USB?

doesn't show more than 3-4 listings, only so many characters, and not arranged alphabetically.

Any way at all to improve this?

No.

does upgrading the firmware improve it?

No. There are hacks for DVDs though.

Microsoft holds patents relating to long filenames and the FAT file system. Apparently Philips doesn't want to pay the licensing fee.

If you want filenames without any munging use 8.3 compliant names: Numbers, letters and underscore only, no more than 8 characters in the name, 3 in the extension. The names will be displayed in the order they appear on the device -- no sorting.

Yes, the situation sucks.

[spin54]

I still love this dvd player, except this whole turning off by itself thing really pisses me off. WTF were they thinking? This should be an option.

It's a great dvd player, but it has alot of flaws too. But for the usb divx playback alone it was totally worth it.

[SingSing]

Do stores still sell this DVD player ?

[Squash]

@SingSing:

According to the BestBuy flyer in yesterday's Sunday paper, it's on sale there this week for $69.99 ($12 off).

I've got one and am very happy with it.

[bdjuf]

...

[jagabo]

any dvd player JUST LIKE THIS one (HDMI, Progressive scan, upconversion, USB) but with the proper USB display menu?

The new DVP-5982 will be out soon. Maybe there will be some improvements.

[mcali786]

hi guys, new one here as I just bougt this phillps player from BB Yesterday.

My only question is, is there any way to minimize the letter box bars when watching in 720p, 1080i mode?

My older dvd player had an option to cut out completely the letter box when viewing...

thanks

[TBoneit]

Hit the zoom button, part of the top and bottom cut off on the picture and have the screen filled. Or don't zoom and see all of the video. I prefer to see all of the video myself.