The modded Xbox thing is a Piece of cake, the ONLY thing that makes it look complicated it the homemade AR thing, other than that, a child could do it

I'm happy to help with any issues (should they arise) although there shouldn't be any.

A question for those that have the DVP-642. Will it play multiple rips burned onto a DVD-R? If so I'm going to Target tomorrow.

Yes indeed it will. You can burn a mix of mpg, divx, xvid on dvdr and it will play them all. You can have it load a menu, or just play the files one after the other (which it will do either way) depending on how you set the preferences (menu mode)

This thing plays over 95% of all my movies just fine including XviD, mpg1 and 2, DivX, and div3.
Works just fine with dvd-r(w) and dvd+r(w)

Greatest thing since sliced bread in my book

what about advanced profile? Packed bitstream, and all the gubbings?

I'm always sceptical when people say it plays "everything". The only one I've seen that fits the description is Xbox, and even then it can't play HDTV and some other formats I don't believe.

The xbox can play HDTV, there are some formats it doesn't though (RV10 springs to mind), basically if the latest mplayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news.html) on the PC plays it so does the xbox.

Walmart's carry them too

I didn't say it plays everything ...but it plays most everything...seems the downside of this player is it does not like QPEL and GMC ,So if you want to watch those type of encoding you have to recompress without those options.I have also noticed it struggles playing windows media content like a wmv or asf file.I downloaded some NYPD Blue episodes and those are in a dual audio ogg sound format and it refuses to even recognize them as files at all.So I think some firmware updates or modifications are still needed but overall it plays about 90% of what I got.I read there is an mpeg mod for the player so I'll let everyone know on that.I flashed the firmaware last night and that was a breeze ...before I did it it wouldn't read subtitle formats but now it reads them all it seems.

microsoft can suck my balls though.

I'm getting an xbox, but they're not worth the price atm, so I'm gonna wait till that xbox2 thing comes out

Same here .

My Yamada won't play GMC or QPEL, or wmv - but the Xbox will. I've just got the whole Rock Profile - Lucas and Walliams (Little Britain) and every file was wmv. Shoved the whole lot onto a DVD +RW and the Xbox plays them flawlessly.

What persuaded me to bin my standalone was the times when I'd settle down to watch a movie and it wouldn't play, or play blockily (is that a word??), which really pissed me off.

I can't extol the virtues of a modded Xbox enough and PC_Arcade's guide is awesome, much better than anything I'd tried to follow before over at xbox-scene.

My only gripe is why I didn't do this before, oh and spud you are a cheapskate if you can't splurge a few squids on an Xbox now :-o

Killingjokezzz, Where did you find Rock Profiles?

I can rip the Rock Profile best of compilation that is on the Little Britain DVD if anyone is interested.

Got them of uknova. Everyone is there bar one (I can't remember which one now as the site isn't hosting anymore). There are 26 from 2 series in wmv format and capped from TV, also the quality isn't that good - but the only full (nearly) source I've ever seen. Total size of all the files is approx 1.7 GB.

really? That's great, looking at the specs, I would have said its far, far too underpowered to handle 1080i video at such a high bitrate. I didn't even think it had HDTV output.

btw. I mean proper HDTV, not those crappy rips that just have it in the filetag

oh yeah, just to be clear I mean this:
http://images.dead-donkey.com/images/m16vu.jpg
http://images.dead-donkey.com/images/m20za.jpg
http://images.dead-donkey.com/images/m38it.jpg
http://scifi.dead-donkey.com/viewtopic.php?t=1084
http://scifi.dead-donkey.com/viewtopic.php?t=1192
http://scifi.dead-donkey.com/viewtopic.php?t=1154

Proper HDTV resolution, and not something like carnivale that's ripped and shrunk down to normal size but still seems to get a hdtv tag when that's not really the case

Yep, proper HDTV (although not at max resolution, you'd need the friendtech Xbox for that)

The xbox has had HDTV support from day one, even the dashboard supports it.

There's a discussion http://www.xboxmediaplayer.de/cgi-bin/f ... =1;t=10030

[edit] 720p = not a problem, 1080i = problems (it'll still play, just not 100%)
There's a list of games which support HDTV : http://www.hdtvarcade.com/xboxlist.htm
As for those DVD's, I'll grab them and let you know, according to XBMC developers, 720p is not a problem [/edit]

It really isn't hard to do, and if you have any problems you can just ask somebody, PCA seems to know everything about it, he helped me out big time. After modding it XBMC works perfectly. I only have trouble with one film (Black blood and lace) which does something weird after a couple of seconds (don't really know how to explain but it isn't watchable at all ).