My personal recommendation is to get a multiformat player as these types of units allow you to play not just normal dvd discs but you can play music cd's, Kodak Picture cd's, MP3 cd's and one of the best features is DivX playback. DivX is a format with great compression, a normal video might come close to taking the full 4.7gigs on a blank dvd as where DivX would average around 700megs. Thus making it where you could roughly fit five of these full videos on one single blank dvd.

At roughly $80 after shipping and handling, this unit could actually be considered cheap for what all you're able to do with it. For a family thing, you could transfer old tapes to dvd and have the ability to watch them on this player. Having your family videos on dvd in a playable format is far better then having those precious memories fade away on an old vhs tape. Note: This player won't allow you to make backups of those old family tapes, you need what is know as a video capture card that connects to your computer for doing that.

This particular unit is great as it has support for your average day TV or you can use the HDMI port for connecting the unit to a HDTV. Plus another great feature is this unit will allow you to connect USB devices too it, such as an External Hard Drive that has all your videos on it.