Playback of DVD-Video

As well as being a DVD recorder, the DVDR3480 is a fully-fledged DVD player. In addition to DVD-Video, Philips claim a wide range of additional playback options for various optical disc and video compression standards, but in this section we will look at standard DVD-Video playback.

Probably one of the first things to demonstrate is…

Making the recorder region-free

On receipt, our DVDR3480 was set to only play region 2 commercial DVD-Videos. However we easily found a hack which enables the DVDR3480 to become region-free. This is simple to apply, worked first time on the review machine and as far as we know; permanent. Even after applying the official Philips firmware upgrade discussed later, the region-free status was preserved. What we don’t know is how many region changes are allowed, before it becomes permanently set.

Anyway, here’s how to do it:

1. Make sure there is no disc in the recorder.
2. Press the <SETUP> button on the remote, then these four number buttons:

 <5>, <0>, <1>, <8>

3. A screen appears as below (we have highlighted the region code in red):

4. The next number you press on the remote is the region code you want: so press <0> for region-free.
5. Press the <OK> button and you should see the highlighted number change to whatever you selected.
6. Press <SETUP> button again.
7. That’s it.

Both before and after changing the region setting, we tried a wide range of DVD-Video discs in the DVDR3480; these ranged from commercial titles on pressed single and dual layer discs, through various home-made titles from digital terrestrial recordings, conversions from analogue video cameras made on previous Philips recorders, and even tried out a mini-DVD (DVD-Video files on a CD). All the DVD-Video titles we tried played fine and no problems were encountered.

The navigation options such as chapter jump (‘|<’ and ‘>|’ keys), fast-forward and fast-reverse all worked smoothly. Pressing the <FFW> and <REW> buttons successively accelerated the speed in doubling steps from 2x up to 32x. Philips have noted occasional problems with display-freeze problems when fast-forwarding through DVD-Video titles (and released a firmware upgrade to fix it), but before applying the firmware upgrade we did not encounter this problem in any of our DVD-Video tests. You may not find it necessary to upgrade the firmware.

Mini-verdict

Overall the DVDR3480 performed extremely well in the tests of DVD-Video playback, and we could not find any systematic problem with any of the discs we tried.

Playback of other compression formats from CD, DVD, and USB

To examine the alleged wide-ranging playback abilities of the DVDR3480, we decided to start off with a tough test; but one which should reflect the way that people want to use the machine’s playback in real life.

The starting point was a single 2.2 GB MPEG2 file which had been recorded from the DVB-T transmissions in the UK (Hauppauge card and DVB Viewer software). This file was known to have many non-DVD standard features, such as presentation time-stamp errors and non-standard group-of-pictures lengths, and so looked like a good test of the DVDR3480’s MPEG2 handling ability.

In addition to this file, several further encodings were made using the popular codecs listed below, and loaded onto various memory devices or burned onto physical CDs and DVDs. Womble MPEG Video Wizard was used for the MPEG1 & 2 transcodings, and FairUse Wizard 2.8 for MPEG4. Within the latter, the XviD codec version was X.XX and the DivX codec was DivX Pro version 6.8. Note that we tested all files in both PAL and NTSC encodings.

Results for the playback of these video files are given below:

‘●’ = plays fine; ‘â—‹’= file recognised but won’t play; ‘x’ = file not recognised.

b/s = bitstream; GMC = global motion compensation; Qpel = quarter pixel

Playback from optical discs

Apart from the player not accepting video that was encoded with the more advanced DivX/XviD features such as GMC and Qpel – which to be honest we didn’t expect it to anyway – the range of AV formats handled by the DVDR3480 is impressive. In particular, the MPEG2 files that were recorded from UK Freeview transport streams were faultlessly played and showed no sign of problems with the differing and non-standard screen resolutions. For example, we tried several recordings at 720 x 576, 704 x 576, and 544 x 576 and at several group-of-pictures lengths; all of which worked without problem.

Similarly, all the MPEG4-based encodings such as XviD and DivX played perfectly with no sign of jumping. Older DVD players sometimes had problems with video encoded as a packed bitstream, but we found nothing to suggest the DVDR3480 was having difficulties with the files we made with this feature.

The usual navigation controls such as fast-forward and fast reverse worked fine on all MPEG-1, -2 and -4 encodings; in both directions up to 32x.

Playback via USB socket

The DVDR3480 accepts any USB1.1/2.0 compatible device in the front panel socket. To show how these things might physically fit, here’s a picture of a 256MB MemoryStick Pro Duo, sticking sideways out of a card adapter:

As you can see from the compatibility table further above, we found that anything that you can play on CD and DVD discs can also be played via the USB socket. This includes large external hard drives (we tried a 750 GB USB2.0 Seagate external drive formatted as FAT32) as well as 2 brands of Compact Flash cards, an SD card and three types of MemoryStick (standard, PRO, and PRO Duo).

On the recorder, when you plug a compatible device into the USB socket, a basic selection menu appears:

It’s fairly obvious what to do; just select the title you want to play with the arrow keys on the remote.

A significant finding was that a 4GB MPEG-2 DVB-T file recorded via a PC capture card and copied to a pen drive, played through from start to finish. Some DVD players will not manage this if the file is greater than 2GB in size and recorded on optical disc, so there is a clear advantage in having this alternative means of USB playback on the DVDR3480.

The only problem we found was in trying to fast-forward or fast reverse through an MPEG-2 file, when the machine locked up at anything over 2x in either direction. This is probably due to the USB port being the 1.1 standard and thus having a low maximum data rate: however if all you want to do is watch at 1x speed then things are fine and we did not come across any glitches during normal 1x playback. With the other types of video file – MPEG-1, XviD and DivX files – as expected with their lower bitrates you can be fast-forwarding and reversing to your heart’s content up to 32x.

Whilst playing back video through the USB port, you can get various items of information about the title by pressing the <INFO> button on the middle section of the remote:

This example (a villain with a stocking over his head, hence the peculiar skin tone) came from an MPEG2 DVB-T file at 544 x 576 pixels resolution, aspect ratio 4:3. The information panel shows, in order:

1. Type of file (‘MPEG’); 2. Time elapsed/remaining (‘8min 19 sec remaining’; notice the ‘minus sign next to the clock icon);  3. Which title is playing/number of titles (‘1/1’); 4. Which audio track is playing (‘Track 1’); 5. Subtitles On/Off (‘Off’); and 6. Repeat play (‘Off’). The bottom line greyed out showing ‘Time’ refers to the highlighted line.

For each line you can change the settings by selecting it, then pressing the <RIGHT> arrow button on the remote, and the options, if any, become available. A nice feature is that with the little info panel showing, the movie still keeps on playing in the background, so you don’t miss anything and can hear or see the selected changes; for example if you switch audio track.

Playback of audio compression formats

Separate audio file playback is generally considered to be a ‘supported’ rather than an integral feature of DVD recorders and players. Indeed the earlier standalone units from Philips and others had MP3 playback from DVD discs deliberately disabled in a collective commercial hesitance to be seen to be encouraging music piracy. These days a slightly more enlightened view means that some standalone DVD recorders and players support a wider range of compression formats and indeed physical media. To test the audio playback capabilities of the DVDR3480, we made several encodings of the same piece of music, using different methods of compression across the range of storage media.

Philips specifications state that the DVDR3480 only recognises MP3 (MPEG1 Layer III; .mp3) and WMA (Windows Media Audio; .wma); but because some people like to rip the audio track from a music video, we included MPEG1 Layer II (.mp2, the DVD-Video standard audio stream), and AC3 (Dolby Digital multichannel; the audio stream on many commercial DVD-Video).

To test other audio compression formats not listed by Philips, we also tried FLAC (lossless public domain encoder; .flac), Ogg-Vorbis (.ogg), and AAC (Advanced Advanced Audio Codec; .mp4) as used in iTunes.

Results for the playback of these audio files are given below:

‘●’ = plays fine; ‘â—‹’= file recognised but won’t play; ‘x’ = file not recognised.

b/s = bitstream; GMC = global motion compensation; Qpel = quarter pixel

Mini-verdict

The MP3 and WMA encodings are fully catered for across the audio playback inputs for the DVDR3480. A handy addition is the recognition and playback of MP2 files; so the audio streams of digital broadcast material can be ripped and played without modification or quality loss. However AC3 audio cannot be used directly and would need transcoding to another format first.

Playback of still pictures

We will just briefly review the still picture display capabilities of the DVDR3480. This feature could be useful if you go out for a walk, take some photos and come back wanting to see what they look like. Rather than fire up the PC and download them, you can just take out the card from the camera and plug it into the DVDR3480 (with a suitable adapter of course). Alternatively, if the camera supports its memory as a mass storage device, then you can just plug the camera directly into the front panel. Note that the DVDR3480 does not accept a connection via a USB hub; it must be a direct one.

Despite the Philips manual stating that only JPEG files would be recognised and displayed, we tried a number of different image file formats: JPEG, bitmap (BMP), portable network graphics (PNG), tagged-image file format (TIFF), and graphics image format (GIF). In fact Philips were correct: the only one which was recognised and displayed was the JPEG files.

There is a basic selection screen very similar to that for music files and most of the control options for viewing the pictures are listed at the bottom of the screen:

So by pressing the <ANGLE> key, images within a folder are displayed as an index of thumbnails:

The thumbnails can be selected using the arrow keys on the remote, and then pressing <OK> plays the slideshow. At any time the sequence can be stopped by pressing the <PAUSE/PLAY> button on the remote, then moved backward and forward using the ‘|<’ and ‘>|’ keys; just like a video really.

After selecting a picture, you can expand it on the screen using the <ZOOM> key on the remote control; to values of 125%, 150%, and 200%; after which it cycles back to normal (100%). Whilst zoomed in, you can pan up/down/right/left using the arrow keys.

If there are MP3 files on the same disc or pen drive, you can also have music playing back at the same time by selecting this first before starting the slideshow.

Mini-verdict

Altogether the DVDR3480 has a simple and effective way to display pictures from a memory device, as long as they are in JPEG format.