Pity.

And they were so proud, too, defying DVD Royalties right down to the core. But when you think about it, current, modern-day dvd standalones only cost a fraction of what they once did, royalty markups or not. It's the abhorrently unfair cost of the discs and the mega-lucrative profit$ they bring in to greedy content-providers (Hollywood) that has always bothered me.

A wag once said "Not since the advent of DVD has (s)vcd been so popular in western countries".

To combat this, I will pay the extra markup demanded for Chinese players if the player itself can comfortably offer decent playback options for formats *other* than DVD - and yes, I would really like to see mpeg-4 (or some variant of Divx) fully incorporated into dvd standalone players as a de-facto *standard*, your own recent foray into the dvd-r world notwithstanding.

Summary: The cost of the players isn't necessarily prohibitive; the costs of dvds ARE. We need alternatives.

Keep playing with that dvd burner.