Finally, I was told that this unit was Region 4 only and I thought I'd be stuck with this restriction forever - but in the vein hope for Googling a hack to this I came across this Spanish website (
http://www.audiorama.com.br/codefree.htm) ... I had to guess what it was saying because I "speaka nada Espanol", but luckily the decimal numeric system is universal (er, worldwide). Go into the setup menu and type 138931 which will bring up Region Code 4, then press up until you hit 0 and press OK. Brilliant!
I checked the firmware version and apparently it's the latest one available (93.06.37.34), so I guess Philips has a little more work to do to get all those **** avi's working as well as giving us the elusive 32 character name listing menu system. I haven't tested the USB yet but I suspect it should work just as well as what you read from a CD/DVD-ROM and I haven't yet tested mp3s on their own yet but it displays jpegs okay. I am also of the belief that you can use a memory card reader (that does 12 or so different formats) that you plug straight into the USB facility and that it should work (my theory anyway) as well as external hard drives. I'm guessing that DTS now exists with the new firmware installed too.
Apart from all those bugbears, I would still recommend this player overall considering how cheap it is and all the features you are getting, but Philips eventually must resolve these rather solvable issues if they are to garner a reputation for providing the best true value-for-money with their products. If anyone has any good websites to refer to for this player (and maybe how to resolve the two or three annoyances it has atm), give us a buzz. Cheers.