The Philips 5982 "Do it All" Standard Definition DVD Player

The Philips DVP5982 DVD Player is the top model in Philips popular line of feature rich, inexpensive DVD players. Some of the features that make the $70 (street) Philips 5982 attractive include:

-USB input, displays images and plays video/audio from USB drives (FAT, FAT32 format, not NTFS formatted drives)
- Plays movie dvd’s and MPEG1, MPEG2, DivX (v3-6, DivX ultra certified) files burned to DVD’s or USB drives
- Plays VCD’s, SVCD’s, recordable DVD’s
- Video upscaling to 1080p (if your HDTV supports 1080p)
- Plays mp3 and wma audio files and music cd’s
- JPEG/TIFF viewer
- Easy to “hack” to make “region free”, NTSC and PAL compatible
- HDMI output
- Attractive, ultraslim styling

The 5982 is a minor upgrade to Philips other DivX certified upconverting model, the 5960, and improves on the 5960 by being able to output at 1080p. I purchased the DVP5982 to be our main DVD player, hooked via a HDMI cable to a 50” Plasma HDTV in our den. In the box is the player itself, remote with batteries, manual, composite (yellow/red/white RCA) A/V cables, and user manual.

Connections and appearances

The DVP5982 has most of the standard connections you’d expect, Analog audio Left/Right out, composite video out, HDMI out, digital coax out, and component video out. Conspicously lacking is an optical audio out, a missing connection that will limit the flexibility many might want in their entertainment systems. The player itself is very thin, and black in color, and except for the color, nearly identical to the Philips 5960. The styling is understated and functional, and the player should look good in any entertainment center.

The controls across the front of the player include power, an open/close button, play/pause, a stop button, and an HD upscale button which cycles between 480p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p (60hz) and 576p/720p/1080i/1080p (50hz). The USB port is also located conveniently on the front of the player.

The DVD tray seems thin and a little flimsy, probably not a great choice for a player that will be used a lot by young children, but otherwise shouldn’t be a problem. The blue LED display is easy to read from across the room, and not overly bright. It doesn’t do anything beyond the basic, ie, it doesn’t display id3 tag information or fun stuff like that.

The remote is small, about 2” wide X 5.5” long. There’s a “d pad” button arrangement for navigating the menu’s and making selections, which is pretty standard, but the left and right menu navigation buttons also serve as the FF/REW buttons. The buttons aren’t marked for this duty, and since its atypical of most other remotes, it takes a little while to get used to. The range on the remote seems fine, at least 20’, thought the player seems to respond a little sluggishly to commands. The remote is identical to the remote included with the Philips 5960.

HD Upscaling

I love having an HDMI connection on the DVD player, running a single cable from the player to my TV carrying both audio and video minimizes the cable jungle under my TV. I picked up a couple HDMI cables for about $5 each from Monoprice.com and they work fine, though its unfortunate that an HDMI cable isn’t included with this DVD player.

That said, past the benefit of using the HDMI digital connection, I’ve not seen much benefit from the upscaling feature of the two upscaling DVD players I’ve tried. The 5982 allows you to toggle through 480p, 576p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p (assuming your TV supports 1080p). I’ve tried all the settings with several DVD’s and see little difference. Nor do I see much difference between the component and HDMI outputs. My 50” plasma Vizio HDTV also upscales natively (Vizio calls it DCDi Faroudja Low Angle De-interlacing Processing), which to my eyes leaves little room for improvement by the 5982. Most recent HDTV’s can upscale images, which minimizes the need for an upscaling DVD player.

Formats Supported by the Philips 5982

To confirm the 5982’s capabilities, I downloaded a copy of Divx Test from http://divxtest.isstar.net/ and burned it to DVD, and, I also copied that DVD to a USB hard drive. This cd contains a collection of image, video and audio files which can be used to test what formats a DVD player supports. I ran these tests from both the DVD and the USB drive.

Audio File Types - Constant and Variable Bit rate MP3 and MP3 Pro files can be played. AAC files can be played. Constant and variable bit rate WMA (windows media audio)files can be played. Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AC3, and MPC 2.0 formats are not supported. Audio files are presented on your TV screen with directories and file names on the left and ID tag info names on the right. The first 14 characters of file names read from DVD’s are displayed, while only 8 characters of file names read from USB drives are displayed. Three lines of ID tag info, up to 14 characters per line, are displayed, so you only see part of a song or album’s name, if its longer than 14 characters. You can play single tunes, or all the tunes in a folder, but only in order, not randomly.

VCD and SVCD support seems to be good, based on what I tried, but I don’t use many of these any more.

Video formats Standard definition DivX and XviD files worked as expected. High definition DivX test files (720p and above) did not play, but these are rare. All standard definition mpeg/mpeg2 files also worked, but as expected, windows media video (wmv) files would not play. One of the tests on this disk involves playing DivX files with bit rates of 750, 1500, 3000, and 6000 kbps. The 6000 kbps files did not play smoothly from a USB drive plugged into the USB port, but all the others did. All bit rates played smoothly from DVD's. I encoded several other mpeg and DivX files with varying bit rates, and the maximum data rates you can play through the USB port is in the 3500-4500 kbps range (video plus audio).

Image Files JPEG files displayed correctly. High resolution files looked great, though they are a little slow to load. 200 kb files take about 10 seconds to load, while 2-3mb files take 20-30 seconds to load and display on the screen. Other image formats I tried, gif, png, pcx and bmp, would not display.

Using the 5982’s USB Port

One the features that sets the 5982 apart from other similarly priced players is the USB port. Philips lists the USB feature as ”USB Direct plays photos and music from USB flash drives”, but the USB port will read any FAT16/FAT32 formatted drives, not only flash drives, but also USB hard drives if they are formatted with the FAT32 file system. The 5982 will not read NTFS formatted drives. The 5982 will display image and video files via the USB port cleanly, as long as the bit rate stays under about 3500 kbps, ie about half the bit rate of commercial DVD’s. You can also play mp3 and wma audio files from USB drives. Some reports indicate that the USB port on this player is USB 2.0 compliant, but I can’t confirm that, it seems too slow to warrant a USB 2 description.

Viewing or playing files from USB drives doesn’t work quite as well as viewing/playing files from DVD’s. If your video files have a very high bit rate, 4000 kbps or higher, you’ll want to burn them to a DVD to play them back, not copy them to a USB drive. If you try to play very high bit rate video files from a USB drive, you’ll see jerky video and the audio will break up. Fortunately, 99% of all the DiVX video files that I’ve seen or encoded have been at bit rates that play smoothly from USB drives. However, if you try to back up a commercial DVD to a USB hard drive, the bit rate will usually be to high to play back smoothly, and you’ll find you can’t navigate the DVD menu’s as well as you could if you were playing a DVD.

Pushing the “USB” button on the remote causes the 5982 to read from USB drive. You’ll see two windows on your screen, in the left window is displayed a list of files names and directories, four (4) at a time, while a preview of image files or ID3 information from audio files is shown in the right window. When you’re reading from a USB drive, you’ll only see 8 character file names, that is SongNumber1 will display as SongNu~1 on the screen. You’ll also see an icon identifying the file type (MP3, AVI, etc). When you’re reading files from a CD or DVD, you can see the first 14 characters in a file name.

While most “off the shelf” USB flash drives can be used with the 5982, most “off the shelf” USB hard drives are NTFS formatted and can’t be read by the 5982. Windows XP or Vista can’t reformat large USB drives with FAT32. However, you can download utilities from hard drive manufactures to format drives with FAT32. I downloaded a disk formatting utility from Seagate to format an external Seagate 2.5” 160gb hard drive with the FAT32 file sytem. I hoped I could just plug this drive into the into the 5982’s USB port, but the single USB port was unable to supply enough power to the USB drive. Although single USB ports on most PC’s I’ve tried are able to power the drive, its not too unusual to run into low power ports, and in fact, the drive came with a second usb plug on the USB cable to provide additional power. Once I connected this second plug into a powered USB hub, the Philips 5982 was able to read the drive. It would have been really slick to plug any old 2.5” USB hard drive into the dvd player with just a single connection, but unfortunately, a second power source is required. On the plus side, the 5982 was able to play media files from any of the USB flash drives I tried without problems, as long as the bit rates were under about 3500 kbps.

Region Free?

If you look up the Philips 5982 at the website videohelp.com (http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks/philips-dvp-5982/8185), a simple region free hack can be found. This hack only involves entering a maintenance code with the remote, and does not require any firmware change. I’ve entered the code to make my player region free, and use it to play DVD’s that one of my family members purchased while living in Europe.

Other Performance Commments and Conclusion

For less than $70, the Philips 5982 has to be considered an excellent value, and it is simply a good DVD player. Image quality on my 50” plasma TV is very good. It will play just about every type of disk and video format you throw at it, except wmv (windows media video) files. Note though, that upscaled standard definition DVD’s from the 5982 (or any upconverting player) still lack the detail of good HD/Blu Ray DVD’s or high definition TV. Upscaling may help in some cases, but most users with recent model HDTV's will see little benefit. The 5982 has a few quirks, like the small remote and no optical audio output. The player is also a little slow to load DVD’s and startup, loading a DVD takes 10-20 seconds. FF, REW, Zoom, and all the standard DVD viewing options work as expected. DivX support is very good. The USB port works pretty well, but its a bit of a disappointment, as it seems to be underpowered and slower than I’d like. While this isn't a perfect player, the faults are minor and shouldn't keep you from buying this player, especially if you want a player with an HDMI output and/or DivX support. If you already have the Philips 5960, don't upgrade, you'll see very little benefit from upgrading to this model.