Kiss DP1000 > Reviews > Good player fireware may be a problem

Author's product rating:   

Picture Playback	Good
Sound Level	Good
Range of Features	Excellent
Durability	Good
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	plays all types of formats inculding DivX/XviD ,looks good
Disadvantages:	firmeware

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

It looks very stylish, has a small footprint (marginally larger than A4 and about 2 inches deep), and has some nice blue LEDs behind the 2 buttons on the front that glow when powered on. However, my initial impression of this DVD player was very low. I booted the thing up straight out-of-the-box, and although the menus worked and looked very pretty, I couldn\'t get any of my DivX/XviD nor my legit DVDs to play. They would all crash after several minutes of watching them, albeit at different times even for the same film. Also, I soon realised that the only Power On/Off button is on the remote control, but when the player has crashed it become unresponsive to the remote control, so you have to fumble with unplugging and replugging the power cable. This gets very tedious very quickly!

I then tried upgrading the firmware to the 2.9.0 version, available on the Kiss website. However, this only made matters worse, and now nothing worked for more than approximately 3 minutes - I was unable to watch any films nor could I listen to MP3/Ogg Vorbis music, and even accessing menus caused crashes to occur frequently!

Fortunately, I found a forum (www.mpeg-playcenter.com) where it recommended I downgrade the firmware, due to incompatibility with the Toshiba drive. You can determine if you have the Toshiba drive via the \'hidden menu\' by powering on your player, and then pressing.... Eject -> Clear -> 2 -> 7 -> 6 and looking for drive reference number 1802.

After installing the unofficial 2.8.5 version available on that forum, I have only found one XviD disc that can not be played - everything else works flawlessly now!!!

As for the quality, I am extremely impressed by how clear the films are displayed compared to watching them on my PC monitor. None of the films I have watched have shown any jittering, nor any problems with lip-synching. I have not seen other DivX-compatible players so can not compare the quality with those, but I found the DP1000 to be better than the sub £100 \'normal\' DVD players I\'ve previously used.

Oh, and for those asking about making this drive region free, it is delivered locked to region 2, but as already mentioned, it is possible to easily unlock this drive, and also remove Macromedia protection if you really wanted to do so.

Overall, I think that this player is a worthwhile investment. It is not yet perfect, and you will need to be careful about which firmware you use. Fortunately, however, KiSS regularly upgrade the firmware in response to users\' feedback, and there is a good community that provides excellent unofficial firmware releases in between the official versions. If you can\'t afford the more expensive models with LAN capability and in-built HDD, then I\'d recommend this player as a cheaper alternative.

I would have given 4½ stars if possible, but instead will only give it 4 stars due to the current problems with the official firmware.