what a machine from Safeways!! The Compacks DVD 5000 is cheap at £43 approx
plays everything ..multi-region crack...and more importantly MACROVISION disabled crack which means that you can record onto video/vdv recorder
without interference on the tape/dvd disk (superb)
smart machine and its full size.you must get one
the best cheap dvd on the market..all my burnt disks play on it cd-r vcd svcd etc; another good point is you can burn mpeg movies direct to disk on a pc and play them straight in the machine without re-encoding them (superb) nice and quiet machine.type "area 450" on your web browser for lots more info including cracks,only problem i have is with mp3 playback ...some tracks are distorted and have a lot of background frequency noise..(they play ok on my pacific 1000 dvd) think is a known problem but machine plays ordinary audio cds fine (burnt and lejit ones)...
totally recommend it..dont be a dope get one!!

As Safeways are currently selling these Compacks DVD 5000 for £34.99. Look gorgeous, doesn't feel cheep, loads of features -at this price you feel like you should have one in every room and a spare one just in case!

Bought DVD player after reading other reviews on this page. Very impressed. Picture and sound fine.

Connected an old hi-fi and speakers up to the rear surround connections and very impressed with result (switch off centre speaker first otherwise it sounds terrible!)

The remote is easy to use although it does look and feel a little plasticy.

Region hack is very simple.

An absolute bargain at the price.

£50 seems to be able to buy you a DVD player from most supermarkets these days, but none come close to this Safeways special, made in China by budget DVD maestros Sampo (the Compacks logo on the front of the player is merely a branding exercise).

So what do you get for your fifty sheets ? Well, it plays DVDs (and DVD-Rs), as you would expect, and also VCD/SVCD formats (despite many budget manufacturers slicing this facility from their specification to save paying Philips a licencing fee !). It also happily copes with CD-R/CD-RWs filled with MP3s, and of course can double up as a half-decent CD player (it ain't gonna win no What Hi Fi magazine awards for its CD playback, but it's only £50, for goodness sake).

Of more interest are the less well-documented features of the player. Bizarrely, the packaging makes no reference to the fact this is an NTSC/PAL Progressive Scan player, something that will serve folk with plasma displays or projectors very well indeed. Certainly, neither the carton nor the player itself mention the feature, with only a derisory mention on the front of the manual, a remote control button marked P.SCAN/NORMAL, a set up menu item, and the fact the component video sockets are marked up as Pb, Pr and Y (the Progressive Scan convention).

But not only that - this deck will playback data CDs burned with MPG files (no need to encode them to VCD first), and even perform some nice slideshow routines if you stick a load of digital photo files on a CD. In addition, if you have those lovely Dolby Digital trailers that were doing the rounds on the internet not so long back, which were in .vob format (the basic building block of all DVD discs), the DVD5000 happily plays them back too. Those of you au fait with miniDVD (essentially 20 minutes of DVD-quality material burned onto a CD-R) will be pleased to know that format's within the player's capability too !

A very easy remote control hack makes this deck the perfect all-rounder. Don't expect any other user friendly hacks to surface in the future, however (nudge, nudge, wink, wink - you know what I mean).

All video formats (aside from VGA) are taken care of, with composite, S-video, SCART and component all catered for. Similarly, every audio connection you need is present, including full on-board Dolby Digital decoding (no dts decoding, more's the pity) output via 5.1 analogue audio outputs, 2 channel analogue audio, and digital bitstreams output via either the coaxial or optical digital sockets.

The player comes bundled with everything a UK owner needs : a SCART lead, two sets of analogue audio leads, a set of composite video and audio leads, the remote, a 12 month manufacturer's warranty, a manual (some of which is in laughable pigeon English, but it's better than some I've seen !), a Philips-style remote control (small buttons crammed into a small space, but helpfully colour-coded) and two AA batteries.

Playback of discs is faultless - the drive is whisper-quiet (certainly a massive improvement on loaders used by Sampo in their players in the past) and there's no meal made of the layer change (I didn't notice it at all on Insomnia, my first test disk).

There's plenty of set up menus to play around with, although most of them will benefit folk hooked up to just a TV or a 2 channel amplifier (3D sound enhancement, a pseudo ProLogic 2 menu, reverb sound effects). It's also possible to alter the picture's contrast, brightness and sharpness settings via a menu.

Some of the £50 players that have emerged in the past look cheap and nasty - no LEDs to tell you what's going on, the size of a small house brick, etc. The DVD5000 surpasses any of these budget babes by supplying the owner with a beautiful on the eye deck, with full LED, quiet playback, superb picture (the RGB picture, in particular, is excellent) and audio and a whole range of playback options.

My only grouse is that annoying blue light that surrounds the circular dial on the front left of the facia. If, like me, you switch off the lights when watching DVDs, it may be a distraction. A nice piece of cardboard taped over it will sort that out. And that's really the only grouse I have !

This deck won't be around for long - it's a Safeways special and I think the promotion may well end on June 30 - what are you waiting for ?

The Compacks DVD5000 seems to be a feature packed dvd player made by sampo. Sampo have a good track record in feature packed low cost dvd players. There are many factors that make a good dvd player but of course not all of them are needed by everyone. If your the type of person like me that downloads vcd/svcds from the internet and burns them to cdr or cdrw you'll be glad to know that this player will both read the disc and understand the format and basically do the business in this regard. No problems with vcds/svcds. It also plays mp3s like so many others. Common to most chinese type players it ships as region 2 but making it multiregion is only a remote hack away.

Connectiviity is excellent because you get composite, s-video, Scart rgb and component outputs. So no problem connecting it to whatever you've got for picture.

In the sound department you have a full dolby digital decoder which also features prologic II. No dts though from the decoder. You get the usual 6 phono outputs to drive the 5.1 channels.

You also have both optical and coaxial digital outputs for use with an external decoder. Which is the only way you will get dts out of this player.

More importantly you get progressive scan for both pal and ntsc. A very good feature. Some have said that the progressive scan picture on this player isn't as good as the interlace picture. What I presume they are saying is the de-interlacer in their projector is better that the de-interlacer in this dvd player as thats what it means in real terms. My own tests with a panasonic AE100 projector is the progressive scan picture is better from the dvd player but I have not exhausted tests yet running different dvds.

The best thing for me about this player is its philips inspired remote control. Excellent remote nicely weighted. Has every feature on the remote I could ever want including the ability to toggle progressive on and off, cycling between connection types (rgb, component, s-video) and select pal or ntsc. Damn nice not to have to go through the menus and it means you can try out different options immediately.

This player seems to be near identical to the Cambridge Audio DVD55 player at £150 (i.e. 3x the price).

I can't really fault the player.

The Compacks DVD 5000 is a superb value for money dvd player available from Safeways. Important note: Dolby 5.1 is enabled by default! Change SPEAKER SETUP for DOWNMIX to STEREO for proper sound thru your Nicam TV.