Home > Consumer Reviews > Philips DVP5160 - Multi-region Capable DVD Player with progressive Scan & Divx

If you'd like to make your player region free follow these steps:

1. Turn on the unit
2. Open the loading tray
3. Press the "Setup" button on the remote
4. Navigate to the "Preferences" page using the right arrow key
5. Enter 138931
6. You will now see the current region code displayed
7. Use the Up/Down arrow keys to select the region required or "0" for all regions
8. Press the "Play" button on the remote "

Like many people, I get sick of the time and money it takes to convert .avi movies to DVD then burn them to disc so I decided to go for this player purely bucause it has a USB input.

I've only had the 5160 a month or two but so far it has been invaluable. I no longer waste blank CD/DVD'S on movies that are rubbish and end up in the bin. I simply stick a 2Gb flash drive in my PC and drag and drop the .avi/DivX movie file onto it. Seconds later, hey presto, unplug the flash drive and pop it into the front of the DVD player. If the Movie is not much good, I delete it! Image quality is excellent (as long as the file is around 700Mb/1.5hr movie) and navigation within the player menu is a doddle.

Needless to say, playing ordinary DVD's is just as impressive. Picture and sound quality are both superb. A friend of mine has the Sony NS76H and even he admits that the sound and picture quality from my Philips is comparable and it cost £210 less. I have yet to find a DVD disc this player won't play, the unit is stylish and sleek and build quality is what you would expect from Philips. Most of all, with a price tag of £38.99 delivered, you'd really struggle to get more for your money!

I bought this player solely for the fact that it has a USB port which allows you to play .avi digital video files on your TV. Set up took a couple of minutes and as soon as I plugged in my USB stick, it recognised it and allowed me to navigate to the video files very easily. Playback quality - obviously - depends on the quality / size of your .avi file, but I'm very happy with what I've seen so far.

This arrived within 1 week of me ordering it. What I was after was a multi region DVD player than can also play AVI's. This was SO easy to make multi region - brilliant. Followed the instructions on the Amazon web site and it worked perfectly, took 30 seconds to sort out. I have also played an AVI from a burned disc as well as from my USB memory stick. Both worked perfectly. For a mere £35 I cannot speak highly enough about this product. Bravo Amazon with the free delivery as well.

I owned the previous model to this and was generally pleased with it. My dad has that now. I bought this because it has a better disk loading mechanism and because of the USB port. (I also bought a 4GB flash drive to use with it). So far, it has performed as I'd hoped. DVDs are crystal clear, but that's usual these days.

But it's the USB port that really interested me. The idea of just sticking in a flash drive rather than burning DVDRs makes a lot of sense to me. Before my new flash drive came, I stuck my USB mp3 player in. It was immediately recognised and I was able to play all my mp3s. Not great sound through the TV but you can always hook the DVD up to some decent speakers.

Once the flash drive came, I copied some music videos to it and stuck it in the DVD player. Just like the mp3 player, the flash drive was recognised straight away and the videos were listed in directory/alpha order. Set one to play and they'll play sequentially from that point within the directory.

Quality is basically the quality of the file. I had no problem playing both AVIs and mpegs, but it choked on a couple of the files. After a bit of playing around my best guess (at the moment) is that the player didn't like the resolution, which was 720x. After re-encoding to 480x576 the vids played fine. Easy enough to re-encode short music videos, more of a pain with movies.

On the whole, although it's still early days, it's doing what I want, so I'm well pleased.