August 08, 2000 - No single DVD player has received such attention as the APEX 600-A. Six months ago, you hadn't even heard of the brand, never mind the model. But some clever fry guy over at APEX figured out a number of ways to get the brand name on the lips of DVD connoseiur everywhere, making them an obvious choice over such bastions of reliability like Sony or Panasonic.

The APEX-600A is easily the All-In-Wonder of DVD players. Not only do you get...

• A full-featured DVD player, with all the bells and whistles most players have and a few more
• A full-featured Karaoke machine
• A Video Disc (VCD) Player
• A CD Player
• The coup de grace: a home MP3 player. Put a CD burned with MP3s in there, it will play them. With the ability to hold some 300 songs per CD, this is like a jukebox on every disc.

...but you get all this for less than $200 US. This sent more than a few ripples through the home entertainment world.

But the real rumblings about this unit began when a secret menu was allegedly 'discovered', one which allowed a viewer to bypass region codes, turn off macrovision copy protection and even was rumored to be able to disable digital CSS encoding on a disc. Well, not all of these rumors were true-- stay tuned as IGN DVD gives you the inside skinny on the new APEX 600-A.

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As soon as word broke on the semi-legal qualities of the APEX 600-A, these babies were harder to find than a pretty girl at a Star Trek convention. I finally got a hold of one a couple of weeks ago, and it was worth the wait. The date stamped on the back of the player I am reviewing is 1/2000, and it has quite a few differences to other APEX 600-As of this model I have seen reviewed. I'll talk about the differences I've noted with this, the new APEX player. But first, a little small talk.

THE HARDWARE - JUST THE FACTS:

One thing's for sure... this thing didn't get where it is today on its good looks. It's a simple-looking front, and a fairly homely one at that. Lucky this bad boy's got personality, cause as Jules from Pulp Fiction once noted, personality goes a long way.

The remote ain't much prettier I'm afraid. Just look at all those nondescript, closely placed buttons and the teeny-tiny writing that captions them. Honestly, I take to remotes like that deaf, dumb, and blind kid takes to pinball machines... it's like my hands have memories after a few seconds of holding the device. This one however has a learning curve comparable to understanding women. Its basic functions are second nature to me now, but for the more advanced stuff I'm still squinting at it. (On the plus side, you'll note that I do have very clean hands, demonstrating my left-hand technique here.)

OK, I just want to talk about one more geeky thing here before we get to what this baby can actually do. I opened this bad boy up to see what was inside. I had heard around the internet that it contained a regular DVD-ROM drive, like you find in computers, complete with IDE cable and computer-standard power inputs. Here's what I found inside:

There ya go, I'm actually holding the IDE cable now. IGN DVD affiliate The Digital Bits reported a rumor in their review of the APEX that someone actually stuck the drive portion into their PC and it was detected by Windows without a problem. So that's how they make'em so cheaply. But the insides of my machine look decidedly different from his. Here is a pic from their review:

The boards looks similar, but the drives are very different. You can actually see the disc that's in my drive. And if you are really keen and geeky, you'll note that the disc is The Abyss. Why is this significant? It was originally reported that for all the bells and whistles on the 600-A, it could not play discs with seamless branching, like The Abyss or Stuart Little. Well, it certainly does glitch and repeat scenes here and there throughout the film, but it never gets stuck in a loop, it generally repeats a 15-second segment once or twice and then continues on throughout the film. This occurs for both the long and short versions, and it is the only handicap of the player. APEX has promised a firmware revision to correct this, but that selfsame correction would remove the secret menu features that we've come to know and love. Worth it? That's up to you to decide!

Enough Geeky Stuff-- Let's Light This Candle!

DVD Playback
This unit eats DVDs for breakfast, and has comparable output to some very high-end players. Once in a while it will come across some audio synchronization problems however, (meaning that you hear the sound at a slight delay from what's happening on the screen)-- a common problem with many DVD players. I've found the best solution is to hit the >> (Fast-forward) button and then ENTER. Hitting the reverse button does not have the same effect, nor does pausing and waiting a second. The only problem is, if you are watching a movie for the first time, you may FF past something important, so you are best to hit << and then >> and then ENTER (be sure it's ENTER, not PLAY!).

The down-conversion for playing anamorphic movies on standard TVs is of a very high standard, miles beyond other players in this price range. You may want to play with the settings somewhat if you do not have an S-Video input for your TV to get the highest quality available for your personal setup.

Audio comes through fine and dandy, but it's hard to screw this up when you are just outputting 1's and 0's to the Dolby Digital Decoder. CD's sound very nice indeed, as do MP3s, remarkably so. This may be partially due to the fact that I am used to hearing MP3s on a computer.

As for common problem discs such as The Matrix and Dragon's Lair, it had no problem, and even that oft-noted layer change where Neo picks up the phone went by perfectly. Now most APEX's are not able to play seamless branching discs such as The Abyss and Stuart Little, and as I stated above, I had a few problems playing both versions of The Abyss, but it was not un-watchable. Check the manufacturing date stamp on the back of your unit (somewhere, Beavis and Butt-Head are chuckling), and markings on the box. Not all Apex's are created equal!

Features available for DVD Playback include: Angle, Goto, Player Controlled Volume, 3 Zooms, Slow, Parental Controls, Three Fast Forward Speeds, Three Reverse Speeds and a feature called A-B. A-B is mighty cool, you hit the A-B button at one point in your film, and hit it again at another point, and the film will repeat between those two points ad infinitum. Again, a wonderful feature probably invented by a Denise Richards fan.

MP3 Playback
The MP3 playback is relatively new for the DVD world, but I imagine that it will become more and more common. The funny thing is that this player now disavows that it carries this talent. It used to be marked on the box (MPG Audio) but has now been replaced with the words "Spatializer 3D Audio". The manual does not cover any of the MP3 playing capabilities either, but rest assured, it is there!

So how does it work? Well, you pop in a disc loaded with MP3s, it loads them and displays their titles on the screen, if you have the screen turned on. Hitting ENTER will start playing them sequentially. The player recognizes sub-directories, and lets you navigate around in them. You can't hit >> to fast forward inside a track, but you can hit >>| to skip to the next track. SHUFFLE also works (Thank goodness, or else we'd never hear the last half of any disc) and shuffles between all directories.

As for song title display, this is a trick in itself to learn. You only get 8 characters, and spaces and dashes are converted to N's, and anything over 8 characters is truncated with an N1 or N2 or however many songs you have that begin with the same characters. So if you had these tracks on your MP3 disc:

The Tragically Hip - Fully Completely - Courage.mp3
The Tragically Hip - Live Between Us - Grace Too.mp3
The Tragically Hip - Road Apples - Little Bones.mp3

It would end up looking like this:

THENTRAN1
THENTRAN2
THENTRAN3

Which is somewhat less decipherable. I have since written an algorithm to rename my files by extracting all the track names starting from the last dash, and removing spaces, so files appear as:

COURAGE
GRACETO
LITTLEBN1

While it reads MP3s and Subdirectories, it will not read MP2s unless the name is changed to an MP3 filename.

It's my understanding that it's legal to make a backup copy of CD's you already own onto an MP3 disc. I believe that it is only illegal to start swapping those files, so go ahead and make your own jukebox.

NOTE: APEX's with a manufacturing date before 9/99 will NOT PLAY MP3 DISKS, AND DO NOT HAVE THE SECRET MENUS. Check your stickers, and be sure to ask when buying one of these on eBay. Not all APEX's are created equal!

Now About that Secret Menu...

The menu that caused quite the stir on WIRED and SLASHDOT is here and very accessible. If there's anyone who doesn't know about it yet, you turn the drive on, without any discs in the drawer. Hit SETUP on the remote, then move the cursor over the menu option PREFERENCES. Now for the trick... hit STEP, |<< (Skip backwards), >>| (Skip forwards), and ta-da, secret menu appears, reminding you that YOU SHOULD NOT BE HERE!

So what, exactly can you do here? Well you can remove the macrovision encoding, allowing you to make recordings of any movie very simply onto any VCR. I tested this out, made a VHS copy of Ghostbusters with the video commentary on, and it came out crystal clear, in 2-channel stereo. (Again, I think this is legal so long as I keep the lovin to myself.)

You can also change the region coding, or remove region coding altogether. I popped in my region 2 Pulp Fiction to try it out. Being a PAL disc, it began playing in black and white. But a quick change in the options menu (I told it my TV was NTSC and not to automatically select), and bada-boom bada-bing, there was color, not bad at all. That said, things did look a bit... ringy you might say, and colors were a tad overdone, but this would hardly be noticeable to the casual viewer.

As for removing the CSS, there is some misunderstanding here. CSS as I'm sure you're aware is the digital scrambling/descrambling system which prevents a user from copying a DVD to his/her hard drive and watching it without having the disc present. Well, it's kind of useless what you can do with this player regarding CSS. When you disable CSS descrambling, all it does is NOT allow it to play any movie that has CSS encoding... so in essence disallowing any commercial movie from playing. Yay!

That's about it for useful functions in the secret menu!

Well, that's all I tested on this thing, you'll have to check out the Video Disks (VCD) and the Karaoke functions on your own. I can tell you that the Karaoke comes with two front end mic ports each with dial volume, echo and vocal assist. Another cool feature it sports is the ability to change key of the karaoke disc to assist the singer... but what makes it cool is that it works for standard CDs too, so you can see what Barry White would sound like if he had a voice like Mariah Carey, and vice versa.

So would I recommend picking one of these up, provided you can find one? Well, considering that I have already talked 5 of my buddies to pick one of these up (that number includes convincing my girlfriend that we NEED one of these!) I would say that's a resounding YES. If it were just an average DVD player with MP3 capabilities for $200, I'd say it would be worth it. But it is a very much above average DVD player with a whole bag of extra features, and some semi-legal ones for $200 which makes it unquestionably worth it, if you don't mind the seamless branching problems.

-- Kevin Archibald would talk all day about his APEX, if you let him.