As an early Christmas present, my wife got me the a Philips DVP5960 DVD/DivX player. This player also has a USB port on the front allowing for USB mass storage devices to be attached allowing for playing of music, displaying of pictures and also for playing of DivX movies.
From my experience of a week, I’m quite impressed. The player is DivX Ultra certified which means it can use the new DivX container allowing for menus, alternate audio streams and subtitles. Through the disc it has played my video selections without problem and with great quality. Playing movies from USB was not quite as successful. The player’s USB port is USB 1.1 which is considerably slower than USB 2.0. This poses a problem for areas of video with maxed out bitrates.
But all is not lost. I took my videos and reencoded them changing the maximum bitrate allowed from 4700 kbps to 3900 kbps (higher than 3900 may be possible). This was done by going into the Advanced portion of the DivX encoder and changing the Manual CLI. The portion changed was right after -vbv. I changed it from 4854000 to 4000000 resulting in that portion of the command being -vbv 4000000,3145728,2359296. Playing videos which previously stuttered during certain scenes with this new encoding has worked, for me at least.