Philips Support - not so supportive
 

I have owned several items of Philips kit over the years and found it to be satisfactory, but the DVD player I recently bought is the exception.

Mainly purchased for playing MP3s, it plays them but cuts off the last 3 seconds of every track despite displaying the correct track length.

When I contacted them by email they suggested I check that the latest firmware was installed and I discovered that V34 is the latest, but V32 is what's showing. "Download and install" they said, so I got the zip file which extracts a .IMG and a .VER file. "File type not supported" came up on the screen so I reported this back to Philips. 'Ah, here is a list of file types supported, and IMG and VER are not amongst them' replied Philips. (in fact the IMG file is not an image file and appears to contain nothing, although it shows over 1mb in the file system)

So they are expecting me to spend time updating something with a file they supplied and which their machine doesn't accept, meanwhile implying that it's my fault because I'm using the wrong type of file!

I think this is going back to Amazon.

Never been a great fan of their designs but got talked into one of their early DVD recorders a few years ago.

It had an awful menu/control system and never worked reliably - about half the discs I tried to record went in the bin. After a firmware upgrade - that was challenging to do, to say the least! - nothing changed. Lots of e-mails to their technical support didn't help either.

And then they said they were no longer supporting the model - about 18 months after it was in their current line-up.

They might have improved their offerings since then but i wouldn't know - I have studiously avoided any Philips kit ever since.

This article may help.
Info: Philips DVD recorder firmware: upgrades, downgrades... - Club MyCE

Found it by googooing philips firmware upgrade.