Mustek V-56L

Mustek V56L

I have found that both the Mustek V56L and the Transonic 56L DVD players have a problem with overheating. The overheating causes the movie to either freeze, lock up or show pixelation onscreen. The way to overcome it is to ensure that the unit is well ventilated.

To do this I simply put four rubber feet beneath the unit (one on each corner) to raise it by a centimetre or two. This allowed for sufficient ventilation and in turn the player has performed well ever since. When sitting on the feet that came stock standard with these units - the feet were simply too low and so the venting holes (which are underneath the units on the lefthand side) didn't have enough room to ventilate properly. Extra ventilation holes to these units would keep them cooler and working more efficiently.

This has been tested with the player being housed in an entertainment unit behind glass doors with a small cable hole at the back.

I hope this review is able to help anyone who has purchased a 56L and is having problems watching their movie the whole way through!

so far so good not had it long. it's not to hard to set up no plugs on the tv so just went through the video pretty easy really. plays mp3 which is good don't know if it can play tracks at random though.

The documentation that comes with the player is extremely poor. Very little information is provided for the first-time user. My television only has an analog audio input. The player has audio outputs for a 5.1 home theatre system. Consequently it was not immediately clear how to connect the two together.

After calling the vendor I was informed that the left and right front outputs can be connected to the television through a special RCA adapter. The RCA adapter takes two inputs and combines them into one. You will need to have two of them if you want to connect a videotape recorder as well.

I found that the player can sometimes be unreliable when playing back disks. Often, it will skip entire scenes. While watching Crouching Tiger, the player skipped the middle third of the entire movie. This is quite frustrating especially if you had invited friends around for a DVD party and they were waiting expectantly for the player to perform.

All in it's good value for the price, and it does the job no problems I've found - I haven't experienced the probs of the previous reviewer - that is skipping and not playing properly.

I owned this player for two months and had no problem yet. Picture and sound is excellent (in low-end/low-cost players) as well as mp3 CBR/VBR.

I'm on my 3rd attempt to get one that's OK - it was really cheap at just over NZ$200 - but I am going to ask for a refund and go higher. The freezing/dropout is really annoying on classical CDs that require seamless transition from one track to another (eg opera). Sound and picture quality isn't bad at all - shame about the finer points - could probably have been the bargain of the decade!

Intially this player performed well and I was inpressed by the comprehensive features and outputs. After 4 months it's performance deteriorated to the point where it would not load many of my DVDs giving a "wrong disc" or "no disc" error message. I returned it. A friend returned his when it would not play. Its replacement could play but not reverse. Another friend's one freezes often.

Only issue so far is it took a long time to recognise a two-song MP3 CD I burned as a test - about 90 seconds. When it did play the songs, they were a bit garbled. However...I had ripped and encoded the songs using LAME 3.93.1 on Linux...and I forgot I had Seti@home running at the same time, so I will keep testing. The docs with the DVD player don't say anything about the MP format, so I had simply burned a disk with two MP3 files on it....and nothing else.

It plays my DVDs very well, and audio CDs too.

Slim size fits under TV easily.

Good remote.

Performs well, good picture and sound, no problems so far.

Great value for money.

You basically get what you pay for with this cheap Mustek V 56L DVD player. Average quality picture, does not handle rented dvd's very well, found video freezing often, subtitles just appear and pop-up whenever they feel like it, video either stops dead, or skips 5 or 10 seconds sometimes on rented dvd's when it hits a bad spot/imperfection on the dvd media, compared to better quality dvd players that cope better with dvd media imperfections. For example, in the same position on a dvd where a certain dvd disk failed on Mustek player, the same dvd media works fine on my computer dvd player and on another more expensive player I tried in a shop.

Only buy this model if you want an 'el cheapo' and cannot afford an extra $100 which would get you something vastly better. I traded mine up for a better one.

Jay.