Philips DVP3166

I have been using Philips DVP3166 for the past 1 and half years.I bought it for Rs 3500 from Vellore. I have purchased this over the others mainly due to its Divx Compatibility and USB connectivity option.

On the Plus Side it does what it supposed to do that is to play commonly used Video and Audio formats without any hiccups

So far i have tested it with following formats and it works perfect for me

In Video

Divx-Home theater profile(As well as custom without changing the resolution), both avi as well as divx extension upto Divx 6.8.5 revision. I tried the bitrate upto 4000 kbits and maximum single file size 2.16 GB without Q-Pel and GMC.

Xvid-Simple to Advanced Simple Profile in avi extension(better to use DX50 Fourcc code instead of Xvid)without Q-Pel and GMC(rest same as Divx)

MPEG-4 file made with MPEG-4 using FFDShow VFW enocder(Not Xvid/Div3)

To my surprsie all these 3 formats plays well in both .MP4 extension as well as the traditional .Avi

MPEG-1 / MPEG-2 in .MPG or .MPEG extension(Main/Std Profile)

DVD Format .VOB(Main profile)

In Audio

MP3(CBR/VBR),M4A / AAC(HE/LE),WAV,AC3,WMA(upto WMA 9)

Photos-JPEG

Through USB almost all the above are playable but there is one limitation though. I have tried with various Capacity Thumb drives and USB hard disks and file system. This machine recognizes only Hard Disk under 40 GB in FAT/FAT32 file system.Both USB 1.1, 2.0 are recognized.

On Minus side it has the following drawbacks

Up conversion of SD into HD not possible,the user interface is very limited and sluggish.It has no amplifier in it in case one want to use this with a home theater system. Also,there is no firmware update available (since its launch in 2007) for this model from Philips.

But still its a great little (cheap) dvd player weighing less than 2 Kgs with a sleek/stylish design and works perfectly for most of the common media formats.

Baali's Rating ****/5