I had once changed the fourcc code and tried playing a XviD file (after changing it to DivX) but that did not work with my DVD Player. Also whatever player you buy dont expect that you can connect your external HDD and play media off it. USB Pen drives will work fine though.
Not sure but a FAT formatted USB Powered HDD should work. Anyone tried that ?
I am not sure whether only budget constraints are making you go for Moser Baer, buddy. There are several specialized manufacturers which produce very good budget players, like Philips, Samsung, and on the little higher side, Pioneer.
I have the Pioneer 610, which is awesome for both DVD and DivX/XviD.
FAT formated HDD works on my Philips DVP 5965k. The only problem is it just recogonizes one partition. I have 4 partitions on it 2 FAT32 and 2 NTFS partitions.
So I just dump everything on the partition that gets detected. I even played movies from my MMC card using a card reader. The movie was converted using Lonely Cat Games Smart Movie Converter for my N-Gage QD.
I ain’t going to play a scratched cd to check it out. Also why does your friend buy scratched pirated dvds when Moserbaer movie dvds simply cost 45 Rs.
Anyways don’t go for Sony. A friend of mine owns a DAV-DZ370, it can’t play movies from usb drives but only music files and pictures. Also I have a movie that has got 14 subtitles and it works for my dvd player but not his. Finally My player supports Divx and Xvid files of resolution 720x576 max, his dvd player supports 720 but can’t play files of width 720.