MCE Buddy Rocks for 7MC Conversions and Commercial Skipping 5

Posted by JD 03/11/2010 at 08:29

I don’t know how to say this any clearer. MCE Buddy Rocks!. It is free, but they request a donation. I haven’t seen any nag-ware.

If you run Windows Media Center 7 and want to do anything with the TV tuner recorded files, check out MCEBuddy. It does the simple stuff by default. I suppose it will work with older versions of media center too, but cannot confirm that. What is the simple stuff?

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Philips DVP Divx Ultra Player Region Hack

Posted by JohnP 06/18/2008 at 10:40

This region free hack was successfully applied to my Philips DVP3982

  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

That’s it.

BTW, I wouldn’t buy this player again. Why?

  • DSP chipset sucks. philips uses MediaTek something according to VideoHelp.com – eh. Never again.
  • It doesn’t play any HD content – at least not with Component Video connections (RGB), so anything over DVD (720p) won’t be played. This is bothersome for x264 and other non-MPEG content. Perhaps HDMI connections will playback – I don’t know.
  • No go to this time function. What’s the big deal? Well, if you have non-DVD content and want to get to 45:00 into it, you have to fast forward. Even at 32x speed, it takes awhile.
  • Limited scaling. There are preset scales – 1/2, 1/4, 1:1, 2x, 4x, etc… My 8 year old Norcent (Mecotek) with SigmaDesign chipset let me scale horizontal and/or vertical in extremely small steps. That infinite scaling worked to easily correct source aspect ratios too. Too bad this Divx player doesn’t.
  • Remote sucks. Pushing any buttons on it takes a few seconds before anything happens. My Home Theater Master universal remote can’t learn the functions either.
  • The box and the sticker on the player claims DivxUltra certification, but Divx.com doesn’t say anything.
  • No long filename support – when you’re viewing JPG DVDs from travels and the first 15 characters of filenames are close, long filenames are critical. Idiots.
  • No Toslink optical audio out!!! Seriously? Good thing I have an open RCA digital audio out left on my THX receiver.
  • Playback of some newer xvid encodes stutter. I’m seeing this on other newer devices, but not on computers or my 5 yr old MediaGate. I’m guessing the playback buffer defaults have changed (smaller) with firmware updates.

It isn’t all bad. When it does work with your content, it looks beautiful. The up scaling of TV resolutions is nice. If you are primarily a DVD watcher, this isn’t a bad player to get. The sound is good – 5.1 is nice. It does have HDMI out among other outputs. I used the component out and RCA digital for Dolby5.1 for over a year, but have recently changed to HDMI with a new TV.

Here’s the manual from Philips site.