Makes a great media center with large USB HD..

I bought this at Best Buy today. I was there picking up a 500GB WD USB HD for $90 on sale and thought i'd see what they had in the way of DivX players. I had read good things about this one and the 5992 (both have the improved USB 2.0). The 5990 was $59 at Best Buy. so for around $150 i have a great 500GB Divx/.wmv/.mp3/etc. 1080i media center for my digital TV. A great alternative to an Apple TV, which i had been contemplating for sometime.

Down to the nitty gritty. If you're using a Mac to set up your DivX Hard Drive for use with this player, make sure you format your USB Drive to FAT-32 (MS-DOS), and also (very important) make sure the partition map is "Master Boot" not "Apple Partition Map". After i did that everything was smooth sailing. I've also used it with a couple flash thumb drives and it works great. Its amazing how smooth the ffwd/seek is when playing from USB.

The Manual says the unit supports USB drives with maximum 300 folders and 648 files. So i figure, most DivX  more

good product

I went to bestbuy, $59, cool, but out of stock. So stopped by Wal-mart, $57, oh even better. Bought it there. (usually amazon's got very good price, but this time, Wal-mart's got the best price :-) )
Went home, plug and play, it is a good dvd player.
There are so many good reviews in great details about this product (or other Philips DVP59xx, they're quite similar) in the Amazon site, I'm not going to repeat them. Just simply put, it's a good product. Build quality and material used and how smooth it operates are all good too.
BTW, Amazon is a great community format with useful info./review. Thanks for a good job.

USB 2.0

this player is alot better than the 5982,and the 5960.I tested my WD passport 250gb on the 5990 with 0 issues ,and no need for an AC adapter to power any external hardrive based on the 2.5" drive.just be sure to format your HD to FAT32.

if your player doesn't recognize your hard drive.try to formate using a program called SwissKnife
http://www.compuapps.com/Download/swissknife/swissknife.htm

I got mine from wal-mart by the way.sorry amazon walmart is cheaper