Home > Consumer Reviews > Magnavox MDV453S Progressive-Scan DVD Player

I have owned this about 6 mos. and it has worked great except once the "open" button on the unit stopped working and the buttons on the remote were acting funny, but this resolved after unplugging the unit for about 5 minutes. Reads my DVD+R backup copies of dvds perfectly. Overall very good for the money.

I have had this DVD player for about a month & have had no problems. The only complaint I have is minor and concerns the remote. The first time that I used this player I saw that both the fast forward and play buttons look exactly the same (but, aren't labelled) and the play button is very close to the down arrow button ... so, I found myself having to experiment with the buttons to navigate and hitting the wrong buttons.

This player did play DVD-R, -RW, and +RW (I didn't have a +R to try), but not well. It kept dropping frames (that is, the video would pause and then skip forward), which is generally a symptom of an MPEG decoder that can't keep up with the bitrate of the DVD. But the DVD was authored at 7.5Mbps max (average 5.5Mbps), and the DVD Forum standards specify that a DVD player must handle 9.8Mbps. This might not matter for most commercial DVDs, which (I've heard) tend to stay below about 5Mbps in order to coddle older players; but there are plenty of titles coming out these days that go for high bitrates to provide maximum quality. If this player can't handle them, then, technically, it is not a DVD player; it should not be advertised as such, and is probably not entitled to use the DVD Forum's DVD Video logo.

Of course, it's possible that the encoder I used to author my DVD was flawed; but it seems unlikely--all three of these discs played correctly in my AMW S99.