I own 3 of the Sony DVP-CX985V 400 Disc DVD players and could not be happier. Sorry to hear yours did not work out for you.

In order to appreciate them you have to forget about the Disc Explorer feature and find another way. For the price the picture quality is excellent in my opinion. I have had mine for 8 months now and they have performed flawlessly. I picked them up for $1300 out the door. That's taxes, tags, and 5 year service plans on each. I knew going in I would need another solution for accessing the DVD slots other than the Disc Explorer feature. To this day I have never used the Disc Explorer. Can't even tell you what the interface looks like. It would have been nice to have the s-link and com port like the CX777ES has. To buy three of those for the price at the time could not be justified unfortunately.

Even with the lack of s-link or com port support one could still use the changers in conjunction HTPC front ends like DVD Lobby and a USB-UIRT device. I could not find a front end that I was happy with however, as I wanted the ability to create themed submenu pages for DVD box sets and so forth. All the front end DVD navigation software out there that I could find did not offer this type of functionality. Programs like DVD Lobby for instance took quite some time to browse through your collection due to the database being so slow. That kind of turned me off as well.

My solution was to build a configuration for use with either the Phillips ProntoNG TSU3000 or TSU7000. I needed a new remote anyway to use with my home theatre so the timing could not have been better. I eventually ended up going with the TSU7000 as I needed the additional memory for later on. Currently I have 1005 DVD covers in my remote which can be accessed by letter or you can just page through my entire collection. I have 16 DVD covers per page, some which jump to themed submenu pages as well. Each DVD cover loads the DVD from the proper changer and cues the rest of my system up accordingly. Just takes a second or two for the macro to execute and 10 seconds or so for the disc to load up. It did take quite a bit of time to program the 1200 macros for loading the changer slots, but once my base configuration file was done it has been all down hill from there. It takes very little time to update my configuration file as well when I need to add new DVD titles. One of the things I really like about about using the TSU7000 to browse my collection and que up DVD's is that I can kick back and browse my collection while another DVD is currently playing or say I am watching something on DIRECTV. With a HTPC type solution you could not browse your collection and then cue something up without bringing up the interface on your screen.

Anyway, if you are interested in more detail check out this thread. My .pcf file is available for download as well. It is not in the files section, but towards the end of that thread I've included a download link for the lastest version.

-Lowpro

This message was edited by Lowpro on 11/23/04 03:30 ET.