THE BEST MULTI-FUNCTIONAL DIVX DVD PLAYER EVER (Medion MD 40814)

Member Name: mdstone

Product:	Medion MD 40814
Date:	29/07/04 (5549 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Looks great, lots of functions,

Disadvantages: Haven't found any yet!

I haven't written a review in a while because I've been so busy lately, but I just had to make time to write about this great multi-region, multi-function DVD player. I was amazed, so I'm sure you will be too.

About Medion
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Medion are a relatively new company which cover the whole product range of modern consumer electronics, including PCs, TV, fridges and fitness equipment.
Medion have set their goal to produce a functional high-quality product with a brilliant design that is offered to the customer at an excellent price/performance ratio.
The company has also won the "Golden Computer" award for their products a total of four times.

Functionality
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Firstly the DVD player is multi-region (region 0), so there's no worry about buying the right region code for a DVD in order to make sure it will work. As it is multi-region, it will play all regions from 1-6 from different countries in the world, which means it will also play copied DVDs which may be in NTSC format.

* VCD & SVCD

As with most DVD players on the market, this will also play VCD, which is an MPEG video compression standard that can also show menus similar to that of a DVD. However, the quality of a very good VCD is about the same as a VHS tape, but is more blurry. Only half of the DVD players on the market today will also play SVCD, which is similar to VCD, but has the quality near to that of DVD and can hold up to 4 subtitles for different languages. This DVD player will also allow you to play SVCD as it has a software decoder that is needed to play this format.

* DivX

As the description of this DVD player suggests, this is a DivX player. If you don't know what DivX is then I'll explain a little about it. DivX is video compression technology that will compress digital video so that it can be downloaded over the internet in a short time without havin
g to reduce the visual quality. DivX is essentially a 'codec' which stands for compression-decompression and is based on the MPEG-4 compression standard.
As you need a DivX codec to be able to read a DivX video file, this is the reason why most DVD players today cannot play them. However, with the Medion MD40814, you can, and there is no conversion needed, you just burn a DivX video file onto a blank CD as data and the player will read it and look no different to that of DVD quality.

* XviD

XviD video compression can also be played on this DVD player, which is almost identical to that of DivX, but this codec is said to offer more superior results in compression compared to DivX. Although this DVD does not state that XviD can be played, I have fully tested this and it plays fine without any problems or issues whatsoever.

* Other Formats

If you're into music then this DVD player would also be the right choice for you, as it plays MP3. I'm sure most of us are now familiar with this MPEG-3 music file compression that we may have downloaded at some point on our PCs. What is great about this feature is that you do not have to burn a CD-R as an audio disc, you can simply burn it as data and store up to 650/700MB of MP3 on a single disc. This results in hours and hours of music play back, and what's more is that you can burn them onto a CD-RW disc too and have the option of wiping it later! This is also great for playing movies as VCD, SVCD, DivX and XviD can all be read on re-writable discs and save you money by erasing them later.
The DVD player will also play JPEG files, so if you have pictures on a CD from a special occasion that you'd like to view on your TV, this is the player for you. This will also read DVD-R and DVD+R but I have not tested this with DVD-RW.

The Look
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This is certainly one of its great advantages it is not bulky in any manner and would fit nicel
y in a room due to its small size and attractive colour. What I like about this player is that there are not too many buttons dashed all over the front of it. Some players can look out of place because of the amount of buttons on the front of the player, which are unnecessary. After all, what's a remote control for?

Playing 'Data' Discs
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When you insert a data disc, such as a CD with a raw Divx, XviD, JPEG or MP3 file on it you are presented with a menu screen which lists folders, and files contained in those folders similar to that of Windows Explorer. So in order to play these files, you simply scroll down to the one you want with the remote and select play. If you have loads of MP3 files on a CD then you do not need to have to press play on each one, as soon as you play a file it will continue to play every file in that folder automatically in order.

Price
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The thing I love most (apart from being able to play DivX and XviD) is the price. At £49.99 including postage and packaging, this baby is a real bargain. Considering you could pay much more for a bog standard system, this is a great deal. I bought mine from Amazon and I can say I've not seen a better DVD player as cheap as this anywhere on the market. The player comes with scart and audio leads and an instruction manual to explain everything about its functions.

Full specifications
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* Modified to provide multi-region playback

* Integrated Dolby Digital (AC3 5.1) Decoder

* DivX 3-5 compatible

* MPEG 4 compatible

* MP3/CD-R/CD-RW/Audio-CD/Photo-CD/SVCD/VCD/DVD-R/DV D+R compatible

* Digital 10 Bit video processing

* Digital 24 Bit DVD Audio processing 96 kHz

* Video formats 4:3; 16:9

* Child lock

* On Screen Display

* Language selection Audio, Subtitle.

Final Thought
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This was the very first DVD player that i've ever bought (not including my DVD-ROM). The reason i've only just purcahsed one is that I wanted to make sure that I was going to buy a quality player that could play lots of different formats at an affordable price. Some people have rushed into buying DVD players without considering its specifications. They may have spent hundreds on a DVD player only to find that they now need to buy a new one because it doesn't play the latest MPEG-3 or MPEG-4 formats.
At £49.99 this is within most people's price range and I would highly recommend this product whether you're a expert with all the functionality formats or not.
Medion have certainly created a high quality product at an excellent price/performance ratio outlined in their mission statement.

Summary: