Review on Toshiba SD 4980 Player HDMI Playback by Matthew Evans

I currently have a Toshiba 4800 DVD player and a Philips 642 Divx/DVD player. I use Philips to play Divx/Xvid files but the picture quality is not as good as great Toshiba, so I've continued to use the latter for DVDs. I was very interested in Divx/Xvid. I was hoping it would fix the shortcomings of the first generation of Philips players and it has: 28 character filename display instead of 11 characters on Philips - Playback of GMC and QPEL encoded files causing problems on Philips - Standard remote control for Toshiba DVD players Codes that allow you to use the universal remote control. The Display button shows the elapsed and remaining time, file number, video and audio encoding information. The picture quality of Divx/Xvid and DVD files corresponds to Toshiba's usual high standards. I don't have HD (so I can't comment on the upconversion) but I have a very good quality SD set and I'm quite happy with the picture quality so I've now replaced my Toshiba and Philips with this player. I haven't had it yet, no hard drive freezes. My guess is that there was a bad batch of lasers in the first production run and the subsequent production was of better quality. I can't imagine why this issue is reported in the fall reports but not in the winter reports. (Note that a particular retailer may have old stock.) Personally, I don't mind blue light, and neither does my wife. However, my player is located above the TV in the entertainment center. The key is probably making sure the player isn't at eye level where the blue light can shine directly at you. You must press "Stop" to open the DivX or MP3 file menu. And there is no "Root" menu for viewing folders - the left or up arrow leads to a list of files in another folder. And oddly, folder names are only 18 characters, not 28 like filenames. PS Regarding remote controls, please note that home entertainment devices come with very cheap batteries that can last for months or years. So before you complain that the remote control doesn't work well, try replacing the batteries with new alkaline batteries. UPDATE: Another month later, no problems (no hard drive freezing). And I found that it will play PAL DVD just like NTSC. Of course, there is still a normal region restriction. 2. UPDATE: I noticed that the player freezes if the filename is longer than 64 characters. Therefore, you need to burn Divx, Xvid, MPEG, JPEG, MP3 and WMA files in ISO 9660 + Joliet mode (and NOT enable "Allow more than 64 characters"). This is actually stated in the player's specs, but some things in the specs aren't true - for example, you can use DVDRs in addition to CDRs, and you can use RW discs. If you only burn DVD VIDEOs or VCDs, you don't have to worry about anything because they automatically conform to the same standards. If you accidentally get blocked for a filename longer than 64 characters, disconnect and reconnect your device. This should fix the problem. By the way, I read in another customer review that the player can read Ogg Vorbis files, but I didn't have any success with that. And in case anyone is wondering, it also doesn't read MKV format files. And still no freezing during playback.