A new home theatre package

This "DVD Digital Theatre System" is currently (November 2003) available as part of a £499 package at Argos in the United Kingdom. The package consists of a Hitachi HTDK170 UK DVD player with 5.1 surround sound (includes 5x 25W speakers and a 35W subwoofer), a Hitachi C28W440N 28" wide-screen CRT TV, and a Hitachi VT-FX340EUK R VCR. A two-shelf stand is supposed to be included, but at the time of purchase we were told that they had run out of two-shelf versions and asked if we would mind a single-shelf version (pictured). There is also a £699 version of this package which substitutes a 32" TV for the 28" one.

Since Argos is a kind of warehouse-store where you order an item through a catalog and it is subsequently delivered it is difficult to know exactly what you will be getting. I know that I spent several hours online trying to find out more about this particular model with virtually no success whatsoever (variations in model numbers on different websites didn't help). So my hope is that this page might illuminate a few people who are researching this particular combination of devices and help them make their choice. Although I will briefly discuss the TV and VCR, this review will concentrate on the DVD player (since that is the device where compatibility and features will be the biggest issue).

The Hitachi C28W440N 28" wide-screen TV
The TV is extremely bulky with dimensions of 532mm (D) x 777mm (L) x 468mm (H) and weighs in at a massive 33.4kg. The box it arrives in is at least 50% larger again in all dimensions (absolutely enormous! and resulted in me having to move a hallway bookshelf in order to get the box into the sitting room!). The TV has all the features I expected, with automatic aspect ratio detection as well as various manual settings (4:3, 4:3 widescreen, 4:3 letterbox, 14:9L and 14:9 zoom). The screen is obviously not perfectly flat (not for this price!) but it is completely acceptable. One negative is that there is a very slight moire effect on the edges of the screen when in widescreen format but it is barely noticeable unless you study it closely. On the plus side the built-in speakers work well - if anything they are too loud, I regularly have the volume set on 3 when the maximum is about 40!. And, probably most importantly, the price is right!

This TV accepts video inputs through a Euroscart connection and a regular RF video connection. It does not have an S-Video input (although higher-end models in this same range do). One thing I noticed is that the package comes with a regular television RF cable (instead of a Euroscart connection) to connect the VCR to the TV. However, upgrading this connection to a Euroscart cable didn't make any noticeable difference to the picture quality (admittedly I tested this with a cheapo £10 scart cable - the store had some that were £50!). However the documentation does say that if you want to watch a NICAM (dual language) VHS tape, then you need a Euroscart connection from VCR to TV. Oddly enough, there is no mention in the documentation of this model of TV working with the NTSC system used in the US and Japan. The included VCR and DVD player do (see below) but this TV apparently doesn't. Odd eh? I have not had the chance to test this since I don't have any NTSC tapes or discs handy. Edit: I have since tested an NTSC DVD and the TV does display NTSC, it's just not mentioned in the documentation.

Note that unlike some higher-end models this TV does not have a built-in decoder for digital terrestrial TV (Freeview in the UK).

The Hitachi VT-FX340EUK R VCR
The VCR is an unremarkable piece of machinery. One of the first things you notice when you see it is the silvery plastic casing which looks fine but feels decidedly cheap once you pick it up. It's also pretty noisy when inserting and ejecting tapes. However it does its real job without any problems. The VCR can playback PAL and NTSC formats and also accepts VideoPlus+® numbers for easy recording of TV programmes.

The video output choices of the VCR are RF out and Euroscart out. There are also RCA audio out sockets. Inputs are via a normal TV aerial socket or the second Euroscart connection. The second Euroscart is intended for input from satellite, cable, or digital terrestrial converters, but I have also had great quality VHS tape recordings from a digital video camera (Sony PC10) using the camera's S-Video output going through an S-Video/Euroscart adaptor and into the Euroscart input port.

The Hitachi HTDK170 UK
The HTDK170 UK DVD player - also known as the HTDK170UK, the HTD-K170 UK, and the HTDK170-UK - appears to have a decent build quality and feels much more sturdy than the included VCR. The front face of the machine is mirrored which looks fairly decent in a retro kind of way. The mirroring is the reason you cannot see the LCD display in the picture to the right. Overall I've had no complaints, except that the open/close button on the player itself is too sensitive (sometimes when I press it the player seems to see two separate presses and opens and closes the disc tray). I've had no complaints about the speakers either. They seem to work fine and sound great.

The video output choices are listed as PAL/NTSC CVBS, PAL/NTSC S-VIDEO, or RGB+CVBS through a Euroscart connector. I have not tested the S-Video output as I have no devices which accept SVCD input.

This player has a built in radio tuner but does not come with any antennas. Unless the signal in your area is particularly good you will need to purchase one.

Note that all commercial DVDs are protected from casual copying by CSS (content scrambling system) and Macrovision. Essentially this means that any analog recording will have a huge amount of static and interference making the film unwatchable. So you can forget any ideas you might have had about recording DVDs onto VHS tape. If you have a DVD burner in your computer you can visit this site for more information on making legal backups of DVDs you already own.

A variety of formats
The HTDK170 UK DVD player advertises itself as a DVD/VCD/CD player with AV Surround Receiver which supports DVD, VCD, CD-DA, CD-R, CD-RW, MP-3 and JPEG discs.

I have tested over a hundred commercial VCD and VCD 2.0 discs on this player (I used to live in Hong Kong where the VCD format is very popular) and all except one has played flawlessly. One thing I noticed is that with VCD 2.0 discs you can press play to stop fast-forwarding or rewinding, while on normal VCD (1.0) discs you have to use the rewind button to 'cancel' fast-forward. This might just be a limitation of the original VCD format, I don't know. Edit: I have since discovered that it is. I have also tested a large amount of CD-Rs and CD-RWs with both movies and music on them. The player has had no problems with any brand I've tried (Imation, Verbatim, Emtec, TDK, SKC, Memorex, Phillips).

The player has not had any problems with either purchased or rented DVDs (it had better not!). I have not tested CD-DA or JPEG discs. I have also not tried a MiniDVD (a CD with data in a DVD format on it), although I would like to sometime. I have also not yet tested XVCDs or XSVCDs (VCDs and SVCDs with non-standard video bitrates).

Edit: I have since tested a miniDVD and found that the player did not recognise it.

Not all DVD players are born equal
I would have been extremely disappointed if this DVD player had trouble with DVD-Rs. It would be pretty unusual for a modern player but you never know! Luckily I have found that the player happily accepts purple-dye Packard Bell (widely available here in the UK) and Ritek G04 DVD-Rs. On a slightly more surprising note, the player recognises and plays SVCD discs flawlessly! This is a bonus for me as I am a fan of the SVCD format (near-DVD quality movies on regular CDs, approximately 45 minutes of video per CD), and VCD compatibility doesn't always mean SVCD compatibility. However, not everything was rosy. The MP3 disc features of this player weren't so clear cut.

MP3 compatible (mostly)
After some experimentation, it seems that a CD-R or CD-RW with a bunch of MP3's at the top level of the directory plays OK, but putting MP3s into folders seems to cause a few problems. The DVD player on-screen menu has options for music playback consisting of Single Track, Repeat Track, Folder Normal, Folder Repeat, Disc Scan, Disc Normal, Disc Repeat, Random and Shuffle. However, if you have a disc full of folders containing MP3s, the Disc Normal and Disc Repeat modes seem unable to automatically start playing a new folder when the last song in the previous folder has been played. This is a serious drawback since it rules out continuous music due to having to manually switch folders (albums) when each one finishes. Random and Shuffle are restricted to songs within one folder. So my advice would be to forget using folders on your MP3 CDs. However if you are like me and would rather not have the TV on while playing music, folders aren't an option anyway (since you cannot navigate through the folders without having the TV on).

For those of us who don't want their TV on while listening to music, the player also displays track numbers and times on the LCD display on the player itself. The track counter can definitely display track numbers over 99 (I've tested with an MP3 CD with 150 songs on it), and there is also a fourth LCD digit so presumably it can also display track numbers over 999. Note that when inserting a 150-song MP3 CD, there is a pause of about 10 seconds before music starts (this appears to be due to the player having to read all the song titles from the CD - the pause is longer with more songs).

Note that it is not possible (on this player) to have music from regular stereo CDs or MP3s playing through all 5 surround sound speakers - only the two central speakers will emit sound. Only discs with 5.1 surround sound (generally this means DVDs only) will be able to take advantage of all 5 speakers and the subwoofer. On the other hand, if you have the TV turned to the AV channel, you will also get music out of the TV speakers.

Continuous music without folders
While I can accept having a CD of MP3s without any folders, when you get to the scale of a DVD it just seems crazy that the folder feature doesn't work properly. Renaming the approximately 150 MP3s you can fit onto one CD so they remain grouped into albums seems daunting enough; renaming the thousand or so that would fit onto a DVD-R sounds like my idea of a nightmare. Having said that, any decent music-playing software (iTunes is one) can take a selection of MP3s and burn them onto a CD, and keep them in order by adding sequential numbers to the beginning of the track names. This at least keeps the album songs together in clumps, although it doesn't indicate which song belongs to which album. However, if you did this on a DVD-R, you would still have to scroll through a thousand MP3s to play a track near the end of the list. Not fun.

Another MP3 DVD consideration
Playing MP3s that I had burned onto a DVD-RW resulted in the machine occasionally freezing while browsing through the MP3 list. This seemed to particularly happen when I was navigating between folders. The only way I found to escape from this freeze was to unplug the DVD player - which, as you can imagine, was extremely irritating. The fact that I had to move an extremely heavy television to unplug the DVD player didn't help either. I have yet to test this with a DVD-R, but I suspect the results will be the same (and I'd rather not waste a DVD-R).

Edit: I am now (December 2003) pretty convinced that this freeze is purely a result of having folders on the disc, and now suspect that a folderless DVD-RW would work. Still haven't tried it on a DVD though! Although I have tried a folderless CD-RW which seems to work just fine.

Yet another DVD question
I have only used DVD-R and DVD-RW discs with this player. I do not have a DVD writer that can burn DVD+R or DVD+RW discs, so I don't know how the player would react to them. Presumably it would be fine with them. It might be that using the + format would cure all my problems with MP3 DVDs (or it may make no difference, who knows?). Although having said that, home movies that I've transferred onto DVD-R have worked without any problems whatsoever.

A shot in the dark
I was curious if the DVD player would be able to recognise MP3s copied onto a DVD-RAM disc rather than a DVD-R or RW but, rather unsurprisingly, the player just spat the disc back out. However this DVD-RAM disc was not in UDF format, which may have been the problem (unlikely, it's far more likely that the player is just incapable of reading DVD-RAM discs).

Freedom of region
DVDs are 'protected' against international piracy by what is known as 'region-coding'. Essentially the world is split up into 7 regions where DVDs released in one region will not play on a player from a different region. As you can imagine I think this region business stinks - since it prevents you from buying off-the-shelf DVDs while abroad, and also prevents people like me from being able to send United Kingdom store-bought DVDs to family and friends back in Hong Kong.

What is needed is a hack to disable the region coding on our players to allow them to play DVDs from any region. Unfortunately there is at this time no known region hack for this particular model of DVD player - the hack for this DVD player's predecessor (the HTDK160 UK) does not work (if only it was so simple!). However people are constantly discovering new hacks for different players. You can check here to find out if someone has discovered a region-free hack for the HTDK170 UK.