To convert I use handbreak to rip the DVD to a suitable format. However there has been an increasing trend of trying to hide the track number in 99 tracks, most of which are just the same chapters out of order.

To record the correct track you need to know what it is, so I’m going to start posting the actual track numbers on my site whether I rip a film or not. I would appreciate any help you can give me by posting in the comments too.

The way I find track numbers is a control on my DVD remote labelled I think prog which gives chapter and track number of what you are watching at the time.

I should add that I am looking at Australian (region 4) content. If you have any details from other regions let me know and I will put them in a seperate post.

G-force – track 32
Up – track 68
Harry Potter & the half blood prince – track 1 (as it should be)
Ice Age 3 (has iPod version on disc) – track 1 (as it should be)
Fame – track 1 (ok no taking the mickey for this one! I know I’m sad!)
Michael Jackson – this is it – track 1 of 99
Lego – The Adventures if Clutch Powers – track 23 of 26
Sherlock Holmes – track 48 of 99
Princes and the frog – track 51 of 99 (US is track 29 of 99)
Alice in Wonderland – track 35 of 99
Iron Man 2 – track 33 of 99
Last Airbender – track 7 of 99
Cats and Dogs 2 – 1 but also get track 3 a roadrunner cartoon.
Sorcerer’s Apprentice – track 28 of 99

First impression was a good price for the features, which include playback of mp4 format video from a memory card or USB stick.

When setting up you get the typical Chinese, rather garish splash screen (I often wonder, do they think apples designs are drab and lacking in colour). Running the setup on the tv was painful though. I have connected my standard def but 16:9 format tv using standard yellow (video) and red and white (audio) cables supplied in the box. I am not sure that these connection are important, but I cannot select the tv format to be 16:9, the option is just greyed out. Other options are pretty standard, but that one means that I cannot get full use of the widescreen format (and let’s face it, the native resolution) of the DVD. I will try other connections over the next few days, but that is just annoying.

On the flipside, video reproduction seems good, and the discs themselves spin very quietly, making my foxtel iq seem even more annoyingly loud.

Mp4 playback was interesting in that it didn’t pick up a mac formatted disc, but when I moved a film to a memory stick, it worked well, again with good reproduction. I have yet to try an h.264 formatted movie with the m4v extension iTunes uses and will report back on that.

Overall I would recommend this DVD player if you connect by hdmi or component, or have a standard def 4:3 form factor tv. If like me you have a 16:9 tv and want to use standard video, yellow cable, stay clear as the squeezing of the image will drive you nuts!

UPDATE: 26 October 2010

This DVD player has just died, so you can get a rough idea that this one lasted about a year and a half. Overall it has been a good machine. The only problems I have come across are: -

• It has crashed a few times, particularly when you try to access something when it is first starting up. Once it has done this it just locks and the only way to restart it is to pull the plug. Once you’ve done that a few times you just make sure you wait for 20-30 seconds after hitting the start button before you try and eject a DVD.
• When it finally died, it did so with a DVD in the tray. To get that DVD out of a machine that had no power meant that I had to take the whole thing apart, literally! Even the DVD drive itself didn’t seem to have a manual way to eject so I had to take that apart too!

Essentially though you get as many DVD quality videos as you want, you can resell if you are in that business, and branding is reduced to a small powered by Animoto.