Philips DVP 5960 HDMI DIVX player - Page 9

I've had this for a couple of months now. Connected to my LCD HDTV via HDMI, output set to 1080i. Very nice player. Works with every USB drive I could throw at it. A week ago I finally hooked it up with a Maxtor 200GB IDE hard drive, enclosed in a generic Meritline enclosure, and formatted with fat32format. I have all kinds of media on it.

MP3 playback:
flawless

JPEG playback:
imaging part is great, but it takes FOREVER to load (5 seconds, sometimes longer). I have 3 Mega pixel and 6 Mega pixel photos, so the file sizes range from 1 to 3 MB. HD JPEG is turned on. I have not tried to turn it off. Is there any way to make it load faster?

VOB playback:
UGLY. I have some DVDs ripped onto a hard-drive with FABDecrypter and DVDShrink. I can navigate and play a VOB file, but the picture is jumpy, freezes a lot, almost like USB 1.1 bit rate is not fast enough. Can this player even play "DVDs" off a hard-drive?

DivX playback:
Mostly very good, sometimes lip-synch problems, sometimes not (I have not upgraded to the newest firmware). I guess I am satisfied with the quality. Can some point me to a good instruction set on how to convert DVDs to DivX? I am using Dr. DivX, but I am not sure which parameters should be set (bit-rate, etc.)

Thanks in advance

If the DVD is an anamorphic 16:9 disk then it should fill your screen at 16:9 if the player is set correctly.

If the DVD is a 4:3 disk - even if the picture is widescreen encoded into a 4:3 image - then it will be horizontally stretched at upscaled resolutions, and have the wrong aspect ratio even if your TV has a zoom that works on HD signals (many/most don't). In this case you need to set the DVD player to 420p, then zoom at the TV or player level, whichever works best. Some players avoid this by "pillarboxing" 4:3 images, but this one won't. - DR

I have a Canon powershot but not sure if it has 16:9. Can you post the final resolution of your jpg that is produced from the Lumix (that produced full screen images with no borders)?

I guess I can crop my pics to that exact resolution.

Thanks

Not sure if this has been brought up. I just noticed today that when this dvd player in turned on , the power led does not light up. When it is off/standby mode, it goes to red. Isn't the power button suppose to light up white when turned on? I was certain it lit up before but now it's not. Can someone confirm?

That's the way it is.

I just picked up this player this weekend on sale- it is hooked up via HDMI>DVI on my 32 inch westy. After using the firmware fix for 720p on the HDMI>DVI (See post below) here are my thoughts:

Previously I used my xbox 360 via vga(1360x768) as my DVD player. After using this Philips either a) The Xbox 360 is a really bad DVD player or b)This Philips is an exceptional DVD player. My guess is it falls somewhere in the middle.

Pros:
-Upscale via 720p details are quite good. The picture is sharp with no washout (compared to the 360)
-The reverse 3:2 pulldown works well. During high action scenes in Revenge of the Sith I used my freeze on my TV and did not see any noticecable interlacing/jaggies. (This is where I noticed how bad the 360 was- blurry, interlace lines, and jaggies)

Cons:
-Playing Divx movies requires some fine tuning. There are definate sync issues on the USB and Discs. Using the lip sync in the setup I was able to fix them for the most part but it can be annoying doing this with every Divx movie.
-The zoom feature is a big dissapointment. The increments are just too big making it impossible to zoom a movie at 2:35:1 to 16:9 to fill the tv without the bars. However, this may not bother everyone.
-The remote is horrible, non-responsive at times.
-The lack of an optical output- only coaxil.

In the end for the price I paid I am definately happy with the PQ.

Do you experience the same problem with all of them?
In my experience, the most sync problems with the DivX files almost always could be traced to bad encoding, and not to the player(s).

Like others I could not select any resolution other than 480p when using a HDMI>DVI cable, even with the newest firmware. I can confirm using the latest European firmware fixes this issue (Credit to Chris55HDM71 for posting this fix earlier)

1) Go to http://www.p4c.philips.com
2) Enter "5960" in the search.
3) Click on "DVP5960/05"
4) Click on the "Software and Drivers" on the left of the page
5) Download the "English (UK), Zip file (1.00 MB) V12.06.36.40"
6) Rename the file to DVP5960_37.BIN
7) Burn and apply the update per the instructions on the website

Now you should be able to select all of the HDMI resolutions. However, by using the European firmware your region code has changed and will not play US DVDs. To change the region code back you will need to do the following hack (credit to SteveCaron orignal poster of this):

Power Up the unit with NO Disc in the tray.
Open the tray
Press the SETUP Button on the remote control
Navigate to the PREFERENCES page using the Right Arrow Key
Press the DOWN ARROW one time to select
Press the 1 button on your remote control
Press the 3 button on your remote control
Press the 8 button on your remote control
Press the 9 button on your remote control
Press the 3 button on your remote control
Press the 1 button on your remote control
The current Region Code Setting will display
Use the UP/DOWN Arrow Keys to select the region required or '0' for All Regions
Press the PLAY Button on the remote control
NOTE - The 0 (zero) in the above sequence represents the Region Code 0 - Region Free. If you want to set to a specific region, just replace the 0 with the region number that you want.

I didn't think the xbox360 was a bad dvd player, but I used component and let my tv do the upscalling. That said, the 5960 was a little better. Not that much IMO.

nichrf36, did the forum that suggested the Euro firmware explain what it is about the current US firmware that makes the selection ability go away with some displays? Anyway, glad to see you got the system working. - DR

For what it's worth, this did not work for me. However, I am now convinced that the problem is my TV.

I have an Olevia LT32HVE LCD TV w/DVI. Manual claims HDCP, and the fix listed enables the various resolution settings in the DVD player. However, when I actually try to kick in the upscaling, my TV screen goes blue briefly with "Not Supported" appearing in the top right hand corner, then it snaps back to 480p and the DVD player displays an error stating that it's not connected to an HDCP-enabled device.

I have contacted Olevia technical support, but I don't have high hopes.

cheer, don't forget to try a different cable (or even just reversing the cable you have). Many handshaking errors seem to be cable-related. - DR

Unfortunately it's DVI->HDMI, so I cannot reverse it. If Olevia has nothing useful to suggest, I will order another cable from monoprice.com.

Haha it was this forum that suggested the fix. The euro firmware text file specifically stated that there was a fix for the 480p as the only option in resolutions on certain televisions.

Sounds like the US firmware hasnt incorporated this yet.

Prior to reading about this firmware fix in trying to troubleshoot I even attempted to hook the 5960 to my computer LCD (A 1680x1050 Widescreen) and could only select the 480p as well.

The post with the olevia TV that sounds like it is the TV side did you check what resolutions are supported through the DVI input? Perhaps if your PC has a DVI out try hooking that up to your TV see if it will work?

It's a great DVD Player plays everything, light and slim. Direct USB plug and play is a great feature.

Haha it was this forum that suggested the fix.

Hmm...but the people doing the really technical stuff with the 5960 firmware are elsewhere, I will have a look in the obvious places.

The post with the olevia TV that sounds like it is the TV side

The easiest diagnostic thing to do is try another hdmi player on the TV; maybe Cheer has a friend from whom he could borrow one. - DR

Is there anyway to make pictures appear immediately instead of having the horrendously slow switching screens?

My Lumix-FZ7 has a 4:3 mode (6 Meg pictures) and a 16:9 mode (4.5 Meg pictures). It also has a 3:2 mode, but that's outside of the scope of our discussion

4:3 mode produces 2816 x 2112 images, which is exactly 4 x 3 ratio
16:9 mode produces 2816 x 1584 images, which is exactly 16 x 9 ratio

So I guess if you resize your pictures to any 16 x 9 resolution (1600 : 900 for example), you should be good to go

ok then I must be doing something wrong becoz I did resize my pictures to 1920x1080 (exactly 16:9) which the panasonic tv SD card slot uses and displays perfectly full screen - no black borders. however the same pic when displayed using the dvd player, even with 1080i output mode still has black borders around. is there some setting I am missing?

thx

Hi

I just got this dvd player and i bought a home theatre system. The problem is my receiver doesn't have a digital coax out. I was wondering if it's possible to connect the receiver via hdmi to this dvd player then connect component video from the dvd player to my vizio lcd and get true dolby digital surround sound and DTS? I know i won't be able to upconvert but I'd rather have surround sound then a slightly better picture. Any help would be appreciated

Your receiver has HDMI in but it doesn't have digital coax in? I wasn't aware such a thing existed.

What receiver do you have?

I have the home theatre system Panasonic SC-HT743. Yeah I looked it up and I read a review saying that surround sound can only be played only on the receiver/dvd player they provided. It's really lame. I have no idea what i'm going to do. Return it i guess...

I looked at similar HT systems and ruled them out because they didn't have either coax or optical inputs.

A good reason to avoid Home-Theater-in-a-Box systems. I don't see how you can get surround out of your standalone player with this.

Is there anyone here who owns this DVD player and is using it with a projector?

I was reading this review and the mentioned "shift" bug would probably cause me trouble with my PJ.

I use a very similar Philips 3960 with my Panasonic projector, and it did have a black bar running across the bottom of the screen. I use an 82" 16:9 screen, and the black bar at the bottom probably took up 2-3" at the bottom. This was watching a movie which was originally shot in 16:9 format. I doubt you would notice it much if watching something more "letterboxed" than 16:9, since the black bars are already there. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm wondering if by choosing 480p as a resolution if the bar would go away. I really only purchased an upconverting DVD player to take advantage of HDMI to my projector, but I'm not really sure if there is much of a picture quality improvement through upconverting. If the picture is just as sharp using 480p through HDMI, and it gets rid of the bars, I might just stick with that.

It's really just a question of the scalar involved -- if your projector's scalar is as good or better than the Philips', then the upscaling feature of the player isn't of much use to you.

That's one thing I've never really been clear on. If I set my Sanyo Z2 projector to 720p or 1080i, I get no picture with my Pioneer DVD player. Does that mean the projector is not doing any scaling?

As for the Philips, I mainly just want a good region-free player and I figured the upconversion would be a bonus.

The "shift bug" is an upscaling characteristic of the mediatek chipset, not the particular player. It (a) should not happen at 480p, and (b) does not represent a loss of any image, just a slight vertical compression. - DR

Hi, from the U.K

Has anyone had problem selecting the HDMI option?, as at present mine is greyed out, so I am unable to select it.