Phoenix Gold Phorum

I've been contemplating building a HTPC to play the movies I have on my external hard drive on my TV, but have neither the funds nor the knowledge right now to do so at the moment. After looking for an affordable solution and doing some research on DVD players that play ISO files, I have come up with something that seems to work! I purchased this Philips DVD player DVP-5990 http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp ... 9495403415 with the high speed USB input and plugged in my Western Digital 500gig hard drive. The DVD player allows you to search through folders and choose ISO/VOB files corresponding to the movies I've ripped for playback. It also retains the fast forward, search, stop functions. DVD menus don't work, but I've eliminated them from the movies anyways so it is not a big deal. Only caveats are that it only works on hard drives that are FAT32 formatted I've heard, but haven't confirmed this, and folder titles are limited to 16 characters or so, so I'll have to re-name some of my movies to fit within this limit.

No more worrying about scratched DVD's, and the convienience of most of my movie collection available at my fingertips, I couldn't be happier. Total cost to me was $100 for the hard drive (which I already had) and $60 for the DVD player.

Great info. I have been thinking of something like this as well.

ive just been using my ps3. i replaced my ps3's hard drive with a wd scorpio black 320Gb and put my old hard drive in one of these.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product
formatted the drive to fat32 and put all my movies and music on it. The ps3 plays almost all of my divx movies flawlessly. I honestly was going to build an htpc but now i dont see the need.