Tips to Buy a DVD Player !!!. Review on Choosing a DVD Player

So you planning to buy a new DVD player. How do you go about it. First now DVD players have become very very cheap. You can get a decent DVD player from Rs. 2000/- to what your money can buy.  It depends on your requirements on what you need to buy. First of all you have to drill down to whether you want a 2.1 or a 5.1 or a 7.1 compatible system. But mostly now all the DVD players support a minimum of 5.1 speaker system. The best options is to go a for a good brand of DVD player with at least an year's warranty. Another very important factor is the loading mechanism. 99% of DVD players come with a tray loading but few ones have the slot mechanism. LG had launched a slot mechanism player last year but was pulled off after getting a luke warm response.

Another very important factor is the formats that the player can play. Most of the DVD players are able to play almost all the formats. But now a days mainly you need to look at whether it plays DivX and XviD files. This is the most common format in which video files and DVD rip movies are available on the internet(most of the times illegaly). Now a days another format that is catching up is MP4 which has become quite predominant. But there is a dearth of players that are able to play this format.

Note: MP4 is not same as MPEG4(AFAIK)

The recent line ups of LG players have USB connectivity and many of them an inbuilt Card Reader. These are very useful because many a times we tend to traansport our data(movies, videos, clips, pics and songs) in USB drives or external Hard Drives.

Wishlist: Future DVD players should(and would be) able to play the RMVB format that is slowly become popular on the net.

I hope this guide helps in deciding your next DVD player.

*Added on 11 Sept 2007:

*Most of the DVD players have the facility for Dolby Digital Sound thats possible after getting a 5.1 channel speaker set. But this thing needs to be checked. This is because all the original DVDs have dolby 5.1 encoded content. Additionally if you are into downloading Divx/Xvid encoded movies from the internet, you will observe that all the movies that are 2 CD Rips(means that a single DVD is ripped into 2 CDs) has 5.1 channel Dobly Digital sound.

AFAIK most of the standalone DVD players do not have an inbuilt amplifier and are dependant on the attached 2.1 or 5.1 speaker system(which have inbuilt amplifier).

FM radio although not necessary but would be a good advantage if bundled with, but most DVD players do not have an inbuilt FM radio. LG has a model with FM radio but the DVD player it self does not have it. Instead the 2.1 speaker bundled with it has an antenna in it. I feel this does not serve any purpose because most of us tend to keep the speakers somewhere near the ceiling and would not be always touching it. So I feel at least for now you can forget about FM. Instead get a good dedicated FM tuner.

Output from most DVD players is in the form of Composite(3 wire, red yellow and white) or S-video and in many cases to a computer monitor. Newer and expensive DVD players have HDMI output too for directing the output to a High Defintiion(HD) computer monitor or TV.

WMV format is not supported by many DVD players but the audio wma is.