My DVD player appears to be dying (stutters on regular DVDs, completely freezes on game DVDs such as Scene It and Name that Tune). Is there a front runner in the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray war yet?
I’d like a quality DVD player, but I don’t want to spend $1000. Also, we had a Betamax when I was a kid. I still think it was better, but I’d rather not to be on the losing end of another one of those deals.
To sum up, anyone have any advice on a new DVD player?
The HD wars are ongoing with no obvious end in sight. I’d get the cheapest thing Wally World has to offer and wait at least another year (or do what I did - go out and buy a PS3 with it’s built-in Blu Ray).
Buy a DVD player that can upconvert to 1080i. I did and believe me it makes your DVDs look really good on an HDTV. It comes so close to HD-DVD quality that I can’t believe there’s even a format war going on. You can find them for less than $100 and Wal-Mart has $30 HDMI cables. For the cables you can not find a better price than that.
I bought my last one at Wal-Mart for $30. I think it’s a Magnavox label. Works just fine on a regular TV. I even have a digital output on it going to my receiver for 5.1 sound and it’s working just fine. The only thing it doesn’t do is DTS sound and nearly every DVD that has DTS encoding also has Dolby Digital encoding which seems to be just about the same.
If you’re still in the dark ages for TV, like me, it’s everything you need.
Oh - and it plays Scene It just fine, too.
One thing to consider before you do this. I was thinking about it, but decided that since I’ll no doubt want whichever HD format wins the DVD wars, I’d hold out. Any HD DVD player will also upconvert your existing dvd’s. So you won’t need a separate player to watch them. So it may be worth it to wait another year for an HD DVD player in whatever format comes out on top, and just get an inexpensive DVD player for right now.