DVD Set Top Players - Who Needs Them?

[DVD Maniac]

Recently I have built a custom PC for my lounge to be able to watch digital pictures and to also try out watching DVD's / Hard drive based media via a Softplayer. After tinkering around with the settings, plus upgrading to PowerDVD6 I am highly impressed with the playback quality from backup / original DVD's and hard drive files which is much better than I was anticipating. After doing some simple comparisons, I am convinced that I am getting significantly better playback quality than that from either of my set top players, each of which are good brands (Pioneer / Philips).

Add to this the fact that the PC + PC DVD Recorder combination always seems to be less fussy about properly authored discs and able to cope better with tracking "low" quality burns I am seriously contemplating ditching my set tops. I'm fed up with my set-tops skipping and jerking when I get to the last 10 minutes of my movies!

Has anyone else gone this route? Any downsides experienced? The reason I ask is that it just does not seem right that a set of custom components can produce better results than a dedicated piece of kit designed purely for DVD playback!

[CWR03]

I also use a media PC connected to my TV, and I like it. Set top players are smaller, quieter, cheaper and simpler to use, and not everyone wants or needs everything a media PC has to offer, otherwise there'd be more people using them.

[theReal]

A set top player is like 50€, it's small and quiet and it doesn't have to boot a complicated OS. I use my normal computer to watch everything except DVDs and it works fine (also with DVDs) but it might get corrupted once in a while because I do everything with it, testing new programs and stuff.
I don't want and need an additional media PC for hundreds of Euros when all I need is a 50€ set-top player.

btw. when you're using the right media and write speeds there's no skipping towards the end of movies, not even on cheaper set-top boxes

[DVD Maniac]

"btw. when you're using the right media and write speeds there's no skipping towards the end of movies, not even on cheaper set-top boxes"

mmmmm. Still think its a bit of a lottery to be honest. I thought I had cracked it with the right combo of media, burn sw, burner, burn speeds etc to get consistency. Then datawrite changed their formulation and I was back to jerky frozen movies on some disks. Checking the burnt disc with DVDinfoPro is SOMETIMES useful, but again, not 100% consistent in terms of playback quality.

Whenever I put disks I have problems with in set-tops in a PC drive (either the one that burnt the disc or other) they always play fine. My expereince is that PC drives in combination with PC decoders and SW are just better at playback consistency and far more tolerant of DVD spec deviations.

There is also a another reason for going the media centre route. If you have invested in a Plasma display with DVI or HDMI connections you can't take advantage of the digital connection unless your player has the same connections. Neither of my current set-tops has them and it seems like only top end players have them at the moment.

So its the PC media center for me (with a set-top as a backup!)

[battscrew]

I rarely have issues playing DVDs on any of my set tops, mind you I keep to the basics - burn half speed only use taiwan (have not tried TYs yet), use DVD+R (set to dvd rom) etc - The only time I have an issue if the media was defective (rare)