DVD Player recommendation

[tomchook]

Hello!
Until now I was using Toshiba's SD-360SR, but since it broke I need to buy a new one.
There are too many brands and options, and that's why I seek your recommendations. My needs are:

* being able to play DIVX, XVID 1.1.2/3 (preferably an option to update the firmware)
* being able to read Hebrew subtitles (srt, sub, and SUB/IDX if possible?) and also if possible a black outline around the subtitles option
* if I press "stop" and then "play" it should continue from the same point it stopped, and not from the begining of the movie/file
* USB input (does it mean I can connect my portable HDD and watch movies through it?)
* cheap

Thanks for your help!
Tom

[jman98]

The ability to read Hebrew subtitles for Divx/Xvid is going to be tough. You're probably going to need to ask on a video forum somewhere in Israel where somebody can really confirm that a player supports Hebrew subtitles. Philips makes a variety of players that can do what you want, but support for Hebrew subtitles is a no go here in the USA. The Philips models I've dealt with here only support Latin and Cyrillic character sets. There may be some models that do support more languages than this, but again, someone who really and truly knows about the support will need to comment rather than people saying "I think it supports Hebrew subtitles" when in fact it does not.

You should also be aware that the following things may or may not be issues for Divx/Xvid playback on standalone DVD players. Problematic things include:
1) QPel (Quarter pixel)
2) Packed bitstream (MPEG4Modifier can remove this without re-encoding if it's a problem for your player)
3) GMC (Global Motion Compensation)
4) Video bit rates over 2000 Kbps are sometimes problematic and may cause audio problems with some chips that decode Divx/Xvid if the audio is DTS or AC3. It depends on the chip.
5) Resolutions over 720x576 rarely work.
Except for problem #2 which can easily be fixed by MPEG4Modifier, all the other issues, if they are problems for your player, can only be solved by re-encoding the file and removing the problematic option.