A while ago I bought a portable DVD player off eBay. Actually, what I was after, was a DIVX player with an optical drive. I bought one of these PA-340A machines, it looks like a discman, but it has the video out capability and plays DIVX and DVD. I've got to say, after owning it for almost 6 months, I'm not very happy with it.

I won't go through the whole drama, but suffice to say, the optical drive is terrible. At first, it would only read some of my discs. And then, it would only play some of the DIVX movies (guess they didn't use a very good decoder chip). Then, it stopped reading any of my data discs (MP3, photos, DIVX, anything!). This is CDR and CDRW (and DVDR) discs. It still played DVD's though.

Eventually I resorted to dumping my movies to a USB key and running them off that. The problem is, when the device reads the USB interface, it produces static on the image. So it's kind of useless as a proper entertainment device.

I did get a USB CDROM and try that, but it refused to interface with the CDROM correctly.

Guess I'm going to go back to a small PC and geexbox. Oh well, at least it will work!