They’ve done it again! At least that’s what I thought while I was browsing the dvd player section of a retail chain here in my town where I noticed a bunch of returned Philips players. The packaging had clearly been opened before so I took the liberty of checking out the manual and as you may have guessed already the device appears to be limited by a serious flaw: 640 files max! Now that I’ve had the chance to borrow a friend’s unit for tesing it turns out:

Philips manuals suck!

MCM 393: Number of albums/folders: maximum 99, Number of tracks/titles: maximum 500

DVP 3260: The unit can only support up to a maximum of 300 folders and 648 files.

Just compare both entries above, the MCM can play a total of 500 songs, the DVP 648 songs per folder! You couldn’t derive this from the wording? Well neither could I!

Of course the DVP cannot handle FAT32‘s 65535 entries per folder. Still this is a vast improvement over the puny 500 files of the MCM393.

It’s kind of ironic though that the lack of official USB HDD support is allegedly due to the large storage capacity making navigation very difficult rather than the filebrowser’s embarrassing limit of 14 (!) chars! The real problem of course lies in USB powered 2.5″ HDDs which sometimes draw too much power so that compatibility cannot be assured. Of course Philips wouldn’t bother to write this valuable info into their manuals either.

But what do you expect from a company that’s too stupid to list the firmware update’s version number on their support page? Hey, there’s a new one out on October the 10th 2008! Your newly bought player reveals the version number but not the firmware date it is using. So do you upgrade or not? I’ve written a FAQ that might help you decide.

Philips – they just don’t get it!