APEX DVD-Video Player Full Featured

By Andy Patrizio, Wired News

5-Apr-00

The Apex AD-600 DVD-Video player may be destined to become a collector's item. Made in China and imported to the United States, the DVD-Video player has some hidden features that have upset the Motion Picture Association of America and movie studios. The $179 product has a hidden menu that lets users view movies made outside the United States. In addition, the Macrovision copy protection also can be disabled, allowing users to make copies of DVD movies onto VHS tape. The makers of Apex recently said future versions of the product would disable the features that are making the product a hot commodity. Thanks to the word-of-mouth, the Apex DVD-Video players that include the hidden features are pretty scarce at nearly every Circuit City store, which is the main retail outlet for the player. However, there are still a few available from the retailer's Web site, so hurry on over and place your order. A local Circuit City store told me they had a back-order of 36 players. The Apex AD-600 is a low-end DVD-Video player that has proved every bit as capable as my Pioneer DV-525, one of the better mid-range players that cost $350 when I bought it more than a year ago. Playing a DVD on the Apex produced colors that were bright and rich. ""Mystery Men"" was a great test, since that movie is the biggest and ugliest explosion of colors since ""Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery."" But in some places, the colors actually looked too bright, like when you turn the brightness on a TV too high. An even better test was ""The Matrix,"" a disc that's as cutting edge as the movie itself. Almost a dozen players, from the low-end to the high-end, had problems playing the disc, but the Apex performed like a champ. The movie ran without a hitch. The Apex player supports DTSÆ Digital Surroundô, a high-end audio format that some $300 players don't support, and the DTS version of ""Saving Private Ryan"" ran with frightening thunder. Overall, the sound was good, but with a tendency to pump too much through the center channel speaker. The player has a built-in DolbyÆ Digital decoder, but in a huge mistake, there's no optical audio-out port, which is standard in almost every other DVD-Video Player. The Apex only has coaxial, which not every amplifier uses. Optical output handles digital audio better than coaxial and in some cases, a $100 RF modulator to convert the audio signal may be needed. One of the nicest features of the Apex is the built-in ratings enforcer. If users set it to PG-14, the player will not play any disc rated R, X or unrated unless a secret code is entered. Kids will hate it, parents will love it. Another feature that's made the Apex so popular is the ability to play a CD-ROM disc full of MP3s. However, when burning the CDs, users will have to set up the disc with a directory called ""Root"" and put all the MP3s in that directory. Even then, the menu is very primitive. The file names are truncated at eight characters. My only major complaint was that the remote was thin and felt flimsy.