I am a movie buff and it’s been years. I have a portable VCD player which I bought four years ago. But watching movies on TV was not of my liking. That was because of the old TV set. Last year on my fathers birthday we bought a new 29″ flat TV. It is big enough for me. And since then I always wanted a DVD player. But the problem was that I wanted the DivX files to play on the TV. So I waited and on Saturday I bought a DVD+DivX player.

I tried searching the net for that model but I didn’t find the link for that. Before that I did some study about available players. There was no player which supported Xvid format which is as popular as DivX. I contacted a dealer nearby for a similar player. There was none available. I was also looking for a player which could play files from USB drive. And all this search ended on Saturday.

Before buying the player, I went to the showroom and asked for models available. I asked whether I can check the player by playing from USB drive and he said OK. That was on Thursday. So I prepared some file samples from all the movie files I have and dumped them on USB drive. Following are the details of file samples.

• DivX 5 with MP3 audio CBR
  
• DivX 5 with MP3 audio VBR
• DivX 5 with AC3 audio
• Xvid with MP3 audio CBR
• Xvid with MP3 audio VBR
• Xvid with AC3 audio
• Xvid with MP3 audio CBR whose FOURCC I changed to DX50

This may sound too technical. Basics of Audio\Video Editing helped me. After I left the site I headed straight towards the dealer. But wait I found another showroom which was bigger. So I went there. I told them my requirement and the lady showed me two models. Now I wanted to check it and she agreed. There was the trouble. No one knew how to operate the player. I was shocked. They kept pressing buttons. One of the marketing agent asked me what I plugged into the player?? A thought passed “Should I kill myself??”

A bit frustrated, I kept myself cool and asked for the manual. I started reading and figured out how to operate that player. Checked all the files and there was a big smile on my face. All files played successfully. Oh.. The player I am talking about is LG DV356. It costs Rs.3990. When I asked about the bargain price she quietly wrote a bill of Rs.3800. Rs.190 less without argument. At that moment I thought I could have saved another Rs.200.  Let it be.

I came home and wad eager to test it. I have my backup DVD’s where I’ve saved some movies. I popped one into the tray and waited. It detected all movies and is able to play files with .srt subtitles. This is great. Watching the movie on big screen was sheer pleasure. The quality is simply great. I have many movies pending to watch. I got a buddy now to give me exactly what I wanted. If you are planning to buy such player the n I recommend this. After reading this post you must have realized that I did some checking.

Now I am loosing my patience for The Dark Knight. I’ll watch it on that. 🙂