I have a DVD player where the screen freezes badly after a while. The screen pauses, starts, pauses starts, and eventually locks up. Newer DVDs play noticeably worse than older ones I have. I’ve got Simon Pegg’s Spaced and cannot play the last few episodes without getting stuck quickly.
Tried a cleaning product, didn’t expect it would work, and it didn’t. What else can I try? I’ve seen suggestions from the cleaning issue to layering? to wacky reset procedures.
What’s up with the blu-ray players? I noticed some that will also play old DVD format. Are they worth the money? Is the blu-ray format really taking off? I don’t buy many discs and just want to be able to play what I’ve already got reliably.
They should all play the old DVD format. If it’s missing from the description of a given Blu-Ray player, it’s almost certainly an oversight rather than a short-coming of the player.
If you’ve got an HD TV and want to take advantage of the HD picture, then yes. If you’re on a standard TV and not planning on upgrading anytime soon, then you’re probably better off sticking with a regular, cheap $30-50 DVD player (assuming no one has a way to fix your existing player). You’d be paying over 4 times that for a Blu-Ray player (as prices are upwards of $200), and it’s the high definition picture that’s the real selling point of Blu-Ray – the other bells and whistles of the format are kinda neat but not enough to justify the price.
Oh, and if you go with a Blu-Ray player, make sure you get an HDMI cable (assuming your TV had an HDMI input) and don’t pay more than $15 for one. Best Buy, for example, will try and grossly overcharge you for $100 HDMI cables. If you can’t find reasonable cables locally, it’s worth ordering them online.
Yes. The competing HD-DVD standard has failed as far as movie distribution goes. At this point, I think it’s safe to say that Blu-Ray is the next standard.
In that case, a regular DVD player (or an upconverting DVD player if you’ve got a high definition TV) might still be a better choice. You only get the benefits of Blu-Ray when watching movies on Blu-Ray discs. In addition, the Blu-Ray discs are a little more expensive. So it’s a trickier call. Also, I don’t think TV shows (such as Spaced) are going to benefit nearly as much from Blu-Ray unless they’re high def to begin with.