Arianet DVD-2255

i have had my Arianet DVD-2255 DVD Player for nearly a year now, everything was going great till now!!!.

Now everytime i play a DVD the disc starts to freeze up and sometimes stops all together,i have tried lots of discs in the machine and everyone has done the same - it frooze up after a short time, if anyone has any ideas let me know PLEASE.

I've had two of these Arianet DVD-2255 DVD Players now and neither worked correctly. The first exhibited horrible screen flickering during action sequences in films. The replacement (with a new firmware I believe) kept green screening then refusing to eject the disc until rebooted. Updating to a Ronin P90H now, hope I have more sucess with this one!

This is Aria's (www.aria.co.uk) own branded dvd player retailing between £69-£75. I purchased mine from http://www.ukdvd.co.uk/ for a penny under £70 (inc. p&p) and was delivered to me promptly via CityLink within 48hrs (placed order at 1600hrs).

Opening the package was great! As you may or may not know I recently gave my comments regarding the Ronin P703 player which I forgot to mention was like a house brick in size (which was returned due to a number of problems - see review).

This machine measured just over 5cm in thickness and about 40cm in length. On ejecting the DVD tray you find that it is situated slightly toward the left, which might put some people off.

Turning the unit around and you find a wide range of audio and video connections. There's an S-video, coaxial and a single scart socket which is a bit disappointing, but then at the price you really can't moan about it too much. As a bonus there is a VGA output to connect to a computer monitor, which I have never encountered before on any DVD unit. This might be very useful for those with projection units so you can show your films with, or using a TFT monitor.

As well as that there are Dolby 5.1/DTS outputs and separate L & R audio outputs as well as optical and composite.

Picture quality is sharp and clear on my 28" TV (using a gold scart cable). Via the menu system you can have S-video/YUB/RGB picture output. S-video shows very vivid, sharp pictures (almost a little too sharp), were as RGB out give excellent colour saturation and depth (almost too saturated in colour).

Something slightly odd occurred whilst testing this unit. With the TV connected via scart in S-Video you seem to lose approximately 5-6cm of the total picture to the left of the screen. This was corrected in RGB mode, but it's something to be aware of. Otherwise picture quality is excellent with the option within the setup menu to default to particular picture outputs i.e., film, smart, ssmart (?).

Sound output is on par with the MIRR-110 (http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews4962.html). Good clear crisp sound with not too much bass using my Medion 5.1 speaks (450 pmpo) and vocal output clear and punchy. There is a karaoke function with 2 6.5mm microphone input jacks which I haven't tested and will probably never will!

One of the most outstanding aspects of this player is in its ability to play any region disk without the need for particular region remote hackz to be inputted first. I tested this feature using an original region 1 "When We Were Soldiers" disk which I know to have RCE. After about 5 seconds the screen flickered and the Universal logo appeared!

This is real coup for Arianet since some people might find it difficult remembering which codes or sequence to hack their DVD player via remote. My mother being one of those people that I'm thinking of!

This is just as well since the remote although not as horrible as the Ronin or Acoustic Solutions DVD players it is still poorly laid out, for example. The fast forward/rewind keys are along the bottom rows which are difficult to access. Plus the blue centre "enter" key does not actually activate the disk to play; the play button is along the second from bottom row of buttons. There is however a dedicated button switching between 5.1 & 2 channel sound which I find useful, but I am nick picking here since the remote response reasonably well with a wide pick up angle my the main unit.

Some people have mentioned that the main unit has a very bright and distracting LED display. I have not found this a problem although I can see the blue LED light indicating the on/off switch might be distracting since it is as bright as a key ring LED's.

Conclusion

This is a great machine with plenty of connection options with a good clear picture output and crisp clean sound. The multi-region ready to go system is a real bonus and the whole built quality of the machine is solid with positive response from operating the buttons on the unit.

You could almost say it was the perfect machine except for the lack of DivX (which is variable in quality) and the ability to play Quicktime files which would be great to watch all those videos on CD singles, but I believe it's an issue with Macintosh and copyright so it's unlikely to be a feature coming soon. I can't comment on Macrovision since I haven't tested for it but I will assume that that operation is still functioning.

I would recommend this player to anyone looking at either first time buying, upgrading their current model or looking for a second player. I really do not see the point in buying a £200+ player which is R2 only just for the reassurance of a "named" brand.

This player has been reviewed by comparing with Acoustics Solutions 421, Mirror MIRR-110, Ronin P703 all have reviews on this website