When looking at the front of the unit there is a large tray which opens outwards over the top of a long display, and to the right of that a group of control buttons. On the top right corner there are 5 direct play buttons, which when pressed will begin immediate playback of the DVD that is in the corresponding position in the DVD tray. To the right of the drawer there is an eject button as well as a long volume decrease/increase button. The border ring of this button is lit with a very cool blue colour when turned on. The light of both the screen and that ring can be dimmed from the included remote. The bottom row consists of a function button, previous, stop, play/pause, next and disc change button.

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One of my favourite features on this player is the USB host input ability. On the front of the receiver there is a USB plug into which you could plug a number of devices to be displayed or played over the TV. One example is plugging an MP3 player in for audio listening. When I plugged my Samsung Yepp into this port and switched to USB input it shows a complete list of all the music on the mp3 player and songs can be selected for playing.

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There's also a headphone output on the front of the receiver for private listening :)

Installation:
Installation of the HT-P38 is quite simple, but does take time none the less. The first thing I did is set all the components where they would be and ran the wires to all the speakers in their appropriate locations. All the wire's have a special colour coded plug which goes into the back of the receiver. When you plug the loose ends of the wires into the speakers themselves there's still a colour coded band on each of the wires that match the coloured push tabs on the speakers. I would have liked to have seen plugs similar to the back of the receiver on the speakers as well. It would make everything much easier with less room for mistake, unless you wish to cut the wires to length, but I wouldn't think that too many people do this.
The rest of setup was quite simple, just plug in the Video cable to the line input on the rear of the TV and turn it on!

Testing:
To test the DVD player called for a night of DVD's! Most of the testing I performed while watching SWAT, one of my personal favourite movies. When I selected "Pro Logic II" sound mode to play the movie in, pressed play and cranked up the volume (I'm sure the neighbors could hear it) I was very impressed. The speakers and sub woofer sounded amazing for their smaller size. Everything from gunshots to voices could easily be heard and the surround sound ads a whole new depth to a movie (we presently have a "cheap-o" budget surround sound) so after watching a couple more DVD's I wasn't able to find anything I disliked about the system (that's a good thing!)
I also gave the USB input a try with an MP3 player. This was also extremely simple to get working and could easily be done by anyone (Don't be intimidated by the thought of connecting your MP3 player into your home theatre system, it's easy!)

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