We have this mounted in the car and it is been use day in day out. From short grocery store trips to long weekend road trips. Plays every thing that has been thrown at it. Never had a single issue, no skips or freezes. Robustly built and comes with all the necessary cables and strips to mount on the head reset. Either you need 110V or 12V in the rear of the car. Then just push the wires through the sides of the car-seat back and be done. Nice and clean, it looks very professional. It also has headphone output, so that I dont have to constantly bombarded with go Diego go song all the time. Video is bright and crisp, it has a good viewing angle even during day time. I wish it had support for battery so that we can use it during camping. It constantly needs to be connected to power. Apart from that I have zero complaints. Fantastic price for dual screen DVD that works all the time. It can continue to play where it left every time the car starts, a must for long trips. I dont want to go back and tinker with it when ever I stop for gas or coffee break. Philips PD9012/37 9-Inch LCD Dual Screen Portable DVD Player, Black
I'm a little surprised by the low reviews on this, but I can't speak as to DivX support, and I knew going in that these are single player, linked systems as I researched on Philips website. These are great little DVD players for the car if you don't mind having only one DVD player to control. I thought the picture on these were good, sound is also decent (took another set of these to get it working, but I'll explain later) and these strap very well to the headrest or seats. I love that they don't wobble around. They are secure which ultimately makes them safer for kids to use in the car. There isn't a remote, but to be honest, I used to try to use our other player's remote and it was a miserable experience from the front seat. (My kids are too young to control the remote themselves)
Now for the bad....these are made by Philips, thus my four star review. I have another Philips portable DVD player and had to send it back to them for replacement after two months - it refused to read the discs anymore no matter how you put them in there. They ended up sending me a new one, but it took a month or two. As far as this specific set, I ordered this and had to send them back to Amazon immediately as they did not produce any audio whatsoever. No audio through headphone jack or through speakers on units with volume all the way up. Amazon was great as always. They had me another set of these within two days and the newer set worked perfectly.
These are great players when they are working. They fit the car well, right height, good picture and sound, and they don't skip. I can't speak to long term durability yet but am a little put off by having to get another set of these just to get one that was fully operational. It's kind of a gamble, but I have dealt with Philips support before and found them to be responsive within the warranty period. This was a much cheaper and better option for us to purchase rather than having the DVD player built into the car so I figure even if I have to go through a couple of these, I am still way ahead money wise of where I would have been. I saw Philips is coming out with a set of 9 inch dual players that do allow both units to play different things but haven't seen it hit Amazon yet so keep that in mind when deciding.
Bought this product, worked great for a few hours but then the second screen abruptly went dark. I couldn't believe it went kaput that fast, but I checked all the connections and settings very carefully. No dice.
Took it back to the place of purchase for another one. SAME thing happened: it took a bit longer but again the second screen stopped showing video (though it continued to play sound).
Once I could see as a fluke, but not twice so my recommendation is to avoid this Phillips product. Too bad because it has nice sized screens and decent image quality when it was working.
i bought the philips pd9012/37 9" dual monitor a few weeks ago and only had a chance to do a quick check (if it's not defective)recently. audio is not great but i am waiting for the earbuds i recently purchased to be delivered. hopefully, this will help. this model has resume mode and yes, you can use the main monitor to watch movies at home, hotel etc.
Don't know how we survived so long without these DVD screens. The kids love them. No problems. Read all the reviews and could see that people mostly were disappointed if they wanted to use this product somewhere other than the car. Or if they wanted each screen to show a different movie (which I think would be too much noise back there anyway unless you have earphones). When we restart the car the movie starts back up where it left off. Good product.
I purchased this ahead of a 6 hour road-trip for the holidays.
Keep in mind that while it is a "Dual" screen, you only can play one DVD for both screens.
Setup: While simple and straightforward, still ends up very convoluted as there are wires coming from the power source (former cigarette lighter), and an AV Wire connecting both screens. It isn't too bad, as our Subaru Outback has that powersource in the between frontseat armrest storage compartment, and allows you to hide some of the power wires. But throw in the headphone wiring for both sets, and you've got the makings of a spiderweb back there. It's a simple buckle and strap to attach to the back of the frontseat headrests.
Screen: The colors and resolution were decent. There's some problems with glare if the sun is coming through the backwindow. Unfortunately on our model, one of the screens had a discolored vertical line right down the middle. Not a huge glitch, but took some getting used to. It seems to be a cheaper, less durable plastic compared to the 7" Audiovox portable DVD that we'd been using up to now.
Performance:
I tested it prior to departure and was able to play 2 store bought DVDs (Caillou and Hi-5), audio CDs (Music Together soundtrack), as well as a homemade DVD where I burned TV episodes.
Unfortunately, when we tried it while on our trip, it didn't work. Which was incredibly frustrating. At first, it wouldn't read the DVD. Then after 5 tries, the DVD reader wouldn't even try -- it would just show "No Disc" in the display, even though we had the same DVDs that were tested the previous day. Going to the support page via my smartphone, it informed me that either the DVD was dirty, or the DVD lens was unclean. (I found that dubious, as I had only tested it the previous day.)
Upon arrival at our destination (my in-laws), my father-in-law suggested using a Maxell Lens Cleaner (http://www.amazon.com/MAXELL-CD345-Laser-Lens-Cleaner/dp/B000001OMA/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1294073285&sr=8-3). After running one cleaning (takes 10 minutes), I ran another test with the same DVDs and it was able to read and play the same DVDs that previously it was unable to play on the trip.
On the return trip, we tried the DVD players again, and then 5 minutes into it, the DVDs froze. Luckily, I still had my father-in-law's DVD Lens Cleaner disk, and did another cleaning. After that, I used a different DVD (but still one of the DVDs that had tested well), and it was successful for 90 minutes.
It seems to me that there are two styles of in-car DVDs -- the "buckle" to the headrest (Philips and RCA appear to be the only "trusted" brands in this equipment genre), or the "embed"-style where the screen is embedded into the actual headrest. We'd prefer to do the former, as we only do these kind of trips 2 or 3 times a year, but have discovered that it's hit or miss (mostly miss) in terms of performance. However, if we were to go with the latter option, it's a significant step up in cost, and I'd prefer not to have that screen there all the time. Given the sketchy performance, and the actual screen glitch, we're going to return this and figure out some other option for long trip entertainment. - Portable Dvd Players - Portable Dvd Player - Dual Screens - Dual Dvd Player'
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