The DVP 642 has many strong points – but menu selection is definitely not one of them. It features graphically boring setup menus. File naming is limited by 11 characters which are way too few to index MP3s, personal pictures and DivX movies. At least it handles multiple file types in the same CD/DVD with ease: you can throw music, image and video files in the same disc and the player will index them correctly even if the file extension was mislabeled. The display feature is pretty useless: it doesn’t display the name of the file being played and it only leads to the Time Search feature.

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Figure 4: Menu selection

The remote control is another low point. It’s non-intuitive, poorly laid out and sorely lacks a backlight. Since the buttons are pretty much the same size trying to find, say, the pause button in the dark is an adventure in itself. If they were of different sizes the finger recognition would be quicker. You can rewind and fast forward the DivX and XVid files up to 8X speed with the remote, as well as browse through the files in the disc with the Skip Next button. If you got stuck with a poorly played Xvid file (usually because of an encoding process gone wrong) you can press twice the System Menu button to bypass this – there’s little guaranty it will work in all cases but it did in some files we used to write this review.

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Figure 5: The remote control