Sony DVP-CX995V 400-disc DVD Jukebox: It's alive!

I now know that I own 315 DVDs. I know this because I spent the last weekend cataloging them all in my new Sony 400-disc DVD jukebox. I have also learned some other important lessons about the value of "supplemental discs," the price one pays for early adoption, the things that studios can do on DVDs to make my life easier but, by and large, do not do, and why I no longer care about box art at all and how I wish there really was a video iPod that could hold actual videos instead of thumbnails of Nelly Furtado showing me her asscrack.

Big Ass Black Box

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How many people will actually need a DVD player that hold 400 discs remains to be seen. Why did I purchase it? Frankly, the big black monolith that was holding the DVDs in their boxes before is big and ugly in my small apartment, I wasn't ready to just chuck my entire movie collection quite yet, and the new machine ended up costing only $200 at Amazon after I used the $50 gift certificate I received for sitting in on a focus group for the blogging product you're looking at right now and getting another $50 for my old Denon 5-disker on Craig's List. Not entirely a bargain, but you don't know how my brain works.

I would recommend this box if you have the room for it, because it's pretty fucking immense, and if you have a lot of DVDs you watch from time to time, even if you only watch a handful regularly and the rest "when the mood strikes," and I suppose that mood is "I forgot I even owned a copy of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!" It also has an HDMI input along with the usual assortment of audio and video plugs on its gigantic backside, so if you own an HD plasma or LCD screen that supports 720p or 1080i, it'll upscale all your DVDs from 480p and make them look as good as they can possibly get until Blu-Ray makes its appearance and you have to buy all those movies all over again.

(For the not quite video geeks in the reading audience, DVDs are 480p, or 480 lines of progressive video, natively. 720p is a step up, and 1080i is another step up. It offers 1,080 lines of interlaced video, so it loads half the picture and adds in the other half interlaced with the first. 1080i is also DVD-HD's maximum native resolution, and certain DVD players, like this one, now upscale 480p to 720p or 1080i. 1080p offers that same 1,080 lines of video but it loads it all up at once, roughly twice as fast as 1080i, resulting in a subtly, or noticeably - depending on who's doing the viewing - clearer picture. Sony's upcoming BluRay discs and players are 1080p, but only a very few video monitors currently can support 1080p feeds, and they require a DVI cable rather than an HDMI cable. Clear as mud?)

What I was worried about was how I would be digging through my vault of videos now that I would no longer be browing a shelf of spines and pulling down a DVD as if it was one of my favorite old books. I envisioned something like an iTunes interface where all my video titles could be indexed and cross-indexed so I could very easily scan through them all and click and play.

Sony's solution is "almost there," but suffers from some inadequacies of this unit not being an actual computer. It's just a DVD player, so the software capabilties and input methods are, shall we say, less than perfect.

Did you know that DVD discs can have their titles and a frame of video embedded on them so that when certain players read them, they can instantly catalog them in a file so you don't have to? It's true! And can you guess how many discs, out of 315, actually had that information available? If you said "around 10%," you'd be right, so grab yourself a keyboard and come along with me on a weekend of typing in movie titles one by one. Tedious, yes, but the benefits are already numerous.

I can now turn on my DVD player, press the "Folder" button and be presented with all my discs in a long list I can navigate with my remote, and then press another button and 20 seconds later (because that's about how long it takes to rotate the 400-disc platter and load the disc into the player and for the player to read the disc and start showing it on my TV) I can be enjoying the opening FBI warning screen on one of my favorite flicks.

Aside from the convenience, how's the picture? I don't currently own an HD TV with an HDMI input so Im using component progressive cables and the image is as crisp and clean and wonderful as any other DVD player. The remote is slim and easy to use, though it isn't backlit so finding some of the buttons takes a quick flip of the lights, and the machine is fairly quiet considering the mechanics of what it's doing. It's certainly much quieter than my Denon was, and it only had to manage 5 discs!

On the downside, it is a huge machine, as mentioned. The player itself is housed in a metal blister that sticks out of the back, and that along with the cables means you need slightly more shelf space than your usual A/V equipment. There are very few video options - one cannot zoom, for example, or pan or do any of the digital video tricks that many Toshibas and Panasonics offer. This is particularly galling when watching some of my older discs before the studios even thought about anamorphic widescreen, but I'll probably just chuck those anyway.

And what about the looks on people's faces when you tell them you own a 400-disc DVD player? If you're like me, you'll read it as jealousy rather than contempt or dumbfounded incredulity. You'll get used to it when you next sit down in your favorite chair, pick up the unit's remote, dial up your "Favorites" folder and sink into an evening of uninterupted video bliss.

The only problem will be deciding which film to watch without realizing you can now easily watch another one without moving your ass an inch.

4 out of 5 stars for convenience, simplicity and removing one ugly piece of furniture from my living room. Point off for lacking some video options and not starting up in progressive mode in the first place, leading to a suspicion that the unit's fucked until one is forced to actually read the owner's manual.