Review on Toshiba SD 4980 Player HDMI Playback by Marcus Zimmerly

After a year of frustration with a Philips DivX player I found this Toshiba to be a huge improvement. My main reasons for buying this player were DivX support, a decent remote control and fast video filename recognition. Philips didn't recognize many DivX and XVID files, it sometimes took more than a minute to set up menus for a DivX encoded CD or DVD, and the remote control was the worst design I've ever seen. above. In the previous test, they complained about the lack of memory settings, especially for HDMI, and one cannot disagree with that. It's not a problem for me though, as my main goal is DivX playback. Its computer video playback performance is exemplary. It installs the menu in just a few seconds. Playback of .avi files is error free; It plays files that Philips chokes on without too much trouble. I've had no problems playing any DVD I've tried and it has NEVER stuck with me. [I've played at least 75 discs since writing this review and one of them actually froze; but my other player and PC did the same on this disc] The effective far angle is as good as other DVD players I've used and better than most. The remote control is nicely organized and fairly comprehensive. The amount of information about computer video formats displayed by the display button is impressive; This player can even handle Ogg Vorbis sound, which is extremely rare among gamers. On the other hand, the blue light that shines around the drawer is really annoying and therefore has to be switched off every time the player is restarted. I don't use a flat screen so I don't care about the HDMI settings, but I see it's a concern for those who need it. For people who need DivX playback and aren't bothered by HDMI limitations or blue light, this is an exceptional player. I would have preferred it to other DivX capable players that I saw without a second's hesitation. Well, if they develop a player that can work with .ogm and .mkv files. . .Supplement: After a while I noticed that while the player plays DivX and other encoded DVDs perfectly, it sometimes freezes on regular DVDs. It's not perfect, but still works well given the price and main application.