Home > Consumer Reviews > Kiss DP-1000 DVD Player (DivX)

Having over 3500 divx disks i wanted a standalone player as usually i just connected the pc to the tv and watched them that way but the missus could not figure it out! - the kiss player is excellent i selected a batch of random disks and out of 30 only 1 it could not handle as it was an obscure codec, plays ac3 disks very nicely and hooks up really well to the stereo system, the selection of cables is great with all rca cables and scart. Easily updateable from the website - brilliant machine (prob works so well as it is not british :) - mp3 disks play equally well with windows type explorer interface - plays anything on the disk,pics,clips etc - well worth the low price.

The online updates are a major part of this player and they do the job very well. I have tried all of it's features and many disks/files. I have never had any problem with this player.

Having ordered a DP-1000 in September I was told that I will have it in one week time... It took over 2 months for KISS to actually send to the distributor...

The first impression can be WOW or What the !$@^??? Depending on the thing you try to play. In my case it was WOW, as it played the DVD-R disk with a film on it. I was impressed by the quality of playback and players ability to correctly size the picture to the TV screen size. Even FastForward worked fine.

I resisted a temptation to immediately give it a 10 out of 10 mark and write a review on it just because I had a little worm telling me that I need to test it further. So I did.

It played DVD-R/RW, DVD+RW disks that I tried, so as far as compatibility with these standards go - it works. I do not question the fact that the playback will depend on the original quality of encoding, BUT! It (DP-1000) managed to have picture errors and pixilation on a few of commercial DVDs, several manufactured DVDs played the introduction but the movie... Well, I only heard the sound...

Pause works well and the picture is spot on (as expected) but leave the unit paused for 10 minutes and it will not be able to recover the playback on DVDs (silver back or recordable). It sounds like the CD reader looses the track and cannot find it again. Whilst it tries to recover from a PAUSE the unit becomes 100% unresponsive and the ONLY way to bring it back to life is to unplug the power cord. It always seems to recover from normal CDs.

Fast Forward works well at the beginning of a disk. If your movie is recorded further on FF will be jerky and when you find the spot you will have to wait for minutes before it finally starts to play the movie (with both video and sound, as it can only start to play video and forget the sound). Fast Backwards... One word - TRASH!

Search time facility works well but should be equipped with a function to "start from the last stop point". It is a bit of a pain in the back having to remember to write down the time your were on whilst watching the movie before you stop it.

If codec is note recognized the unit will say so and will not hang (thanks goodness!!!!)

Now on other wonderful features if DP-1000.

When the unit is OFF it makes high pitch noise that can drive you bananas! It probably comes from the switching power supply that is not 100% OK. When the player is powered up it is silent.

I was surprised to see a broken warranty seal on the unit that came from a sealed box. So far KISS didn't comment on this (I raised the issue with them).

What would my overall judgment be? Well, a lot of problems noted can be fixed or overcome by firmware updates and tweaks, the question is whether it would ever happen... DP-1000 is usable and is a relief to running up and down to your PC to control the movie playback, unfortunately you have to stick to the basic functions and make a habit to adjust yourself to the player, not the other way around.

Overall I would give this player a 5 out of 10 marks.

When i finally received my dp-1000 after 2 months, i opened the box to see this lovely black piece of hardware, and began testing its features.

Firstly divx encoded movies- played them all, and even seemed to be better quality playback than on my pc. no problems what-so-ever.

DVD - many of the commercial movies i tried had problems including Resident Evil and Ice Age. when i first put in the disc and played it the video hung while the soung continued, but stopping and playing the dvd seemed to fix the problem. otherwise the quality was better than my older dvd player (sony master) a EUR1200 player. in fact id say it probably was the best quality ive seen in any DVD player.

CD audio - when i first tried cd audio the unit stalled after 27 secs into the cd,only way to restart the unit was to pull out the plug and put it back in, downloading the latest firmware patch (v2.7.9) fixed this straight away to otherwise exelent sound quality.

mp3 audio - exelent again, no problems here.

updating the firmware is easy. download,burn,insert the disk, pull out the plug, put it back in and press enter on the remote thats it.
im very surprised that they even give you the source code on the web so that you can write your own firmware.(requires linux)

all in all an exelent dvd player with only a few bugs which i hope will be fixed soon with updates.they can be annoying but only take a few seconds to get around. i love this thing hope you enjoy yours.

It plays anything and everything, which is great.

The problems I'm having is playing music. I use Ogg Vorbis instead of MP3 which is why I bought this DVD-player. It does play Ogg-files.

However, some Ogg-files, say one in a hundred, hangs the player and I have to cut the power to get it back. Funnily enough, they always hang on 1 min 59 seconds. I've send an example to Kiss, but never heard from them. If I re-encode the song to Ogg again it usually works. Thankfully I can use DVD-RW so I don't waste good discs while checking.

Another, slighthly bigger problem is that quite a few Ogg-files of quality 5 or higher starts to stutter so I now encode everything at quality 3. Even then I've got two songs (out of 4000+) that stutters even at quality 3. The same song on MP3 192 kb/s variable bitrate plays without a glitch.

Oh, and it does get hot, but I usually just disconnect it when I'm not using it.