Hello, I got a Philips DVP5140 (Divx Supported) player today and have been having alot of trouble with finding an answer to this question. I have been seaching online for about 6 hours trying to find an absolute answer for this, but nothing I have found has seem to give me a final answer to it. I got this player to be able to play my .avi/.divx files on my TV. I have the files on Maxell DVD+Rs (player supported), I used DLA Drop and Drag to put the files onto the disc. Then I finalized them by clicking 'Make Compatible'. I have done this with all the discs I have made. I tried them out in the Player and they do not work. It just comes up and says 'Unknown' Disc, meaning I guess it reads it as a blank disc or a media it can't read. I tried about 15 disc, all made in the same way and it still says that each time. I tried the region hack to see if that in some way would fix it (I doubted it would but thought what the hack) It didn't fix it (no surprise). I tried taking one of my .avi files and putting it onto a Sony CD-R to see if that would play, it didn't. Everywhere I have looked online, everyone says about how good this player plays there .avi/.divx files right out of the box, nothing about it not playing any of there divx movies (I seen were people saying it gave them no sound but picture with some of there files, but I don't even get that, just 'unknown' disc) I checked to see if there was a Firmware update out there, but from what I can tell I have the latest version already on the player. I'm hoping that I won't have to reburn all my files in some kind of different avi format just so I can play them on this dvd machine, kinda defeats the reason why I got it in the first place, convenience. If anyone could help me on this I would be very happy I would like to send it back as soon as I can if I find theres no way for me to fix this problem, so a fast answer would make me double happy Thanks in advance. --BlueMeep
Well well well, and i thought i was the only one who had ever went through that. Same thing happened to me 3 seperate times, on 3 differnt brands & models. When i was going through this i narrowed it down to less than a handfull of choices. 1] Some discs cannot be played back due to incompatable recording conditions, or characteristics of the recorder or special properties of the disc. Make sure that all your DVD's are finalized, some DVD Players boast that they can play unfinalized discs which is seldom the case. [my MWD7006 for example]. BTW, that compatable mode box you are checking really does not make it compatable, it has to do with multisession DVD's. All it does is make sure that at least 1 GB of data is written to the DVD no matter how small the file is. Reasoning is that a lot of dvd players cant read the disc if the recorded portion of the disc is too small [less than 55mm across]. SO, stayign with choice #1 it could be that the player doesnt like whatever you are using to prepare the disc. I dont know what DLA Drag & Drop is, so I cant help you there. To eliminate this as a cause i would suggest that you burn the next one with like Nero Platinum to make sure. The unknown disc message is a big clue because it says 1 of 3 things, either the DVD player doesnt like the software/settings you are using to make the DVD [or doesnt like the media]. 2]Or the more likely choice is.... ITS DEFECTIVE AND BROKE If this player isnt playing EVERY major video format [except mp4 which is not supported] on any type of media then theres probably something wrong with it. Its just that good.The Disc not recognized message could obviously be caused by this. My 5140 has played everything i put in there except OGG and WAV files regardless of Tthe media the media DVD+or-/cd/DVDRW/cdrw. When i bought my APEX 1500, I had to return the first one because it wouldnt play SVCD which it was supposed to but it did play mpegiso and dvdiso which it wasnt supposed to. WHen I bought my 3 Magnavox 7006's I had to go back a total of 5 times because they weren't doing what they were supposed to. And last but not least, it took me 2 tries to get a good Philips 5140. Lets face it guys, these things are made cheap to sell cheap, and they are not very durable. With my Magnavox's, Wal-Mart had a whole pallet of defective players Im sure, cause everytime I went back to that same store I got another bad one. Finally just went to a different wal-mart and that solved the problem, got a good one. I would just try using nero next time and see if that helps before you go through the trouble of taking it back. BTW, I have also had players in the past which didnt like certain DVD brands... Had a lot of trouble with Memorex myself.
Thank you C92 your reply helped me out ALOT. I went and got me a copy of Nero (Been hearing about it forever but stuck to freeware software to do some of the things Nero does like burning, ripping, and so on)I been using this program that came with my Dell computer called DLA (Drive Letter Access, it might have something to do with the Sonic software that came with my computer but not sure. I have used DLA for all my backup data needs forever, never really had a problem with it before. After doing some more research on DLA and Nero I have found out some interesting things, mainly, that DLA uses a file system called UDF and that Nero and other burning software uses CDFS. CDFS is the standard file system for disc from my understanding, and UDF is a newer "more compatible" file system that can work on more platforms, like older computers,different CD/DVD drives, macs and so on (not 100% about this part but this is what I took from it) Anyways, standalone Divx players seem to only work with disc that were made in the CDFS file system (Nero does this for sure, I would guess theres other software burners, maybe freeware burners that do this too). So I used the Nero Data DVD thing, throw some different file types on there to test (.Avi .Divx .Xvid .Mov .MPEG .JPEG) and burned it. I played it and it worked I was very happy. All the file types I put on the disc worked (expect the .Mov file, but that was just to test for fun, theres no standalone player on the market that plays .MOV that i can think of) So it proved to me that it was my discs and not the player, sad thing is I have 50+ dvds that I need to reburn using Nero, I might just copy files I want to a DVD-RW or DVD+RW for when I want to watch them, then just copy over them, it would save $$$ and time but ill think about it and figure that out laters. So that takes care of all this for me, I hope this info can help others out, I have always found my answers to things by using google and checking fourms, this is the first time I was unable to find anything on the net about this. If this UDF file systeam becomes bigger, then this well become a bigger problem for people with standalone Divx players that use the UDF file syteam for burning disc. Thanks again for the help C92 --BlueMeep
