DVDealer

Trying to shop at local stores to get an idea of how well DVD players they have play JPEG files and MP3 files on CDR/CDRW discs is a painful exercise, since most places don't have their DVD players hooked up to TV's that you could test readily. Fry's was supposed to have more hooked up, but their sales people either had their brains lobotomized or basically were pretending that they didn't have customers waiting around to be helped (just a little frustration from a wasted trip tonight showing...).

What I'd like is to find a player that will load CDR or CDRW discs (ISO9660 or MS Windows Joliet format) and be able to find JPEG files that could be in any subdirectory on that disc (not necessarily the top directory or some fixed directory that Picture Discs are in). Also, it should be able to find MP3 files in subdirectories too.

Of the places I did go to, the players were pretty good at finding MP3 files in subdirectories and playing them. However, if you had JPG files on the same discs as MP3 files, it wouldn't find them (thinking you just had an "MP3" disc and not ask whether you want to look at the pictures it found *or* the JPEG files it found.

I'm hoping that there is a reasonably intelligent DVD player out there that can do these features in addition to having decent DVD playback capabilities (progressive scan, etc.).

Any animal out there that someone knows about, any place I might be able to pick up this information, or are there any stores out there that have all of their display models hooked up to TVS so that I can bring in a sample CD to test with?

Thanks?

Teknomaagi

Yamada DVD-2100 does this. It plays .jpg files from CD-R/RW disc or as well, DVD-+RW disc. Also MP3+WMA playback from CD-RW or DVD-+RW discs. Good zooming, rotate of images as well.

Only thing is that it has no Progressive scan.

DVDealer

Cool, I'll look for this one. Do you know if it can play JPG files from a disc that also has MP3 files on it? Most of the ones I've tried only play the MP3 files in this instance. I'd hate to have to reburn a lot of CDs where I've mixed the two on them. Thanks!

Dr. Dean

I can confirm that the Toshiba 3900 can do this with BOTH MP3 and JPG and it allows you to choose which you want to view...It is available at Best Buy for $95 but if you have a 10% preferred customer coupon it is ~$86 AND it is Multi-region out of the box!!!

AND AND AND it is progressive scan.

DVDealer

Donkey shins Dr. Dean! I was hoping I'd get something to buy before the weekend was out so that I could take advantage of that very coupon. Now I know that I want to check it out and have them hook it up to verify it. Sounds like a good deal. And $86 is not much more than the price it would have taken to "perhaps" have fixed my old Sony DVD player that I just got rid of.

Dr. Dean

I have had this for 2 days and the only thing I can complain about is the lack of true SVCD support...But if you "trick" the player it will accept SVCD formated VCD's.

DVDealer

Just was over at Best Buy and picked this one up! Compared to my experience at Fry's the other night, this was night and day. I even got one sales guy to hook this up so that I could verify that it worked the way I wanted before I burned my 10% coupon on it. Worked just as advertised and even navigated the directory structure nicely. Just the way I'd expect these players to work! Thanks a bunch! Just what thet doctor ordered!

Picked up three DVDs at 20% off as well (Six Feet Under set, Dances with Wolves Extended Edition and Catch me If you Can). Got all of this stuff for just a little over $200 including sales tax! Sweet!

Now if Best Buy would just start selling stuff for my Mac, I'd be there a lot more often! I'm hoping that the San Marcos Fry's here in San Diego is a better experience when it opens later this year!

Dr. Dean

Glad you got what you were looking for...now go get a R2 PAL disc and pop that in and be more impressed

breaux124

Pioneer DV-260 for $89 at Walmart does JPEG, MP3, WMA, Progressive Scan, etc
Link

It's the same player as the Pioneer DV-363:
Pioneer DV-363 Link

DVDealer

After playing around with it a few notes on it though:

1) The maximum JPEG files it will "find" in a given directory is 648. It doesn't "see" any after that amount. Any CD's you create you might want to ensure that no one directory has more files than this amount.
2) A minor issue that I can deal with is that when you have multiple directories that span more than a page, it sometimes is a pain to visit the directories at the end, as the player doesn't have "memory" of what page you are on when you go into a subdirectory. Not impossible, a few more keystrokes to visit the last directories in a directory that is in the middle or at the end of the list, but it would have been nice to "bounce back" to where you were when navigating back up the hierarchy again. I can live with it, but the interface isn't "perfected" quite yet?
3) One thing I noticed when watching my X-Files Season 7 set. It seems when you are hitting different pages in the set that the clips/music "start late", so that it feels like you missed the first note or two in the music, etc. I'm not sure if it's a bad authoring on the part of Fox doing the X-Files, or if it is the player, but I also tried another DVD (my bonus Xena DVD from Best Buy that I'd had problems with reading earlier on my Playstation) that had the same issue. It played the DVD fine, but it also seemed to chop off the first note or two of the music there too. Let me know if you see the same behavior or not. I'm wondering if the player isn't buffering things right, etc. when it loads clips or the like. Not sure if it's a hardware problem specific to my player, or if its something inherent with this model that you might also see as well. If you don't see it, I might return it to see if I can get another player without this problem, otherwise, perhaps complain to Toshiba to see if they have any replacement chips, etc. that might fix it.

DVDealer

I returned the player to get a new one to see if I could get rid of the chopping off of the beginning of video/audio clips, that seems to be happening all of the time.

Unfortunately, the replacement player seems to have the same problem, so I'm guessing it is something in the chipset or the like that is causing this problem. I'm going to call Toshiba CS to see if I can get them to respond to this problem shortly, Maybe they can find some way of fixing it.

Doctor Dean, have you seen this happen on your player too? Find a DVD that has clips of audio start as soon as you click on a button and see if you get the same thing happening. As noted, X-Files Season 7 shows this problem a lot.

I really don't want to get a different player. I really do like the player otherwise for the most part.