I'm looking for a DVD player that can play avi files, but I have a few other things I'd like it to do and I need some advice please. My budget isn't that strict, but I don't really want to go over £200 ($380), and I'm concerned about buying one with bells and whistles that I won't use.

The Phillips machines get a lot of good write up and the model I was looking at initially was a Philips DVP 5960. Looked really good, £70 and had a USB port so that I didn't have to burn loads of DVDs to watch avi's I'd downloaded on the computer.

The trouble is when I started to look around a bit more, I got confused. I started to look at the DVD recorders (and keeping with Phillips) saw the PHILIPS DVDR3380 (£120) and the PHILIPS DVDR3440H (£200) both with Firewire ports. This made me think I could plug my video camera into the machine and burn to disc. The down side is no USB, so I need to start burning DVDs from my computer every time I want to watch an avi file - which seems a pain.

The young lad in the shop said get a Firewire to USB adapter and you'll be fine. I've seen them on the Internet, but everything I read say Firewire and USB aren't compatible, so I'm a bit sceptical.

Can anyone offer advice please.

It would be nice to burn stuff from my camcorder

What I'll get most use from is watching avi files I've downloaded on my PC

Can have my cake and eat it?Can I buy a machine with a Firewire (iLink) port and then buy a USB adapter, meaning I can record camcorder output and watch avi files that I'm storing on a USB memory device?