Movie Problems

I’ve come across three damaged DVDs from our nearest Blockbuster store in two weeks. We rented Toy Story two weeks ago to show our boys, but when I put it in the player, the feature movie wouldn’t play. We could watch all the previews, but not the movie we actually wanted to see. When I returned the DVD to the store and told them the problem, the clerk credited my account for the rental. We got something else several days later.

A couple of days ago, I rented another movie, for myself to watch, and it froze up at the last 10 minutes. I took the movie back and told them the problem. Again the clerk credited my account, but this time I got another movie right away. I watched the new movie that night, but again, it flaked out half way through and skipped a chapter. I could watch the rest of the movie, fine, but just couldn’t see that one chapter.

I had tried all three movies in our main DVD player and in my computer DVD player to make sure the problem wasn’t our player. I got the same error in both machines.

When I returned the second movie, I asked the clerk if they test the DVDs when someone tells them there’s a problem. The clerk told me that they did not test them, and that they just throw the disc out and get a replacement.

When I returned the third movie, I told the clerk that this was the second movie in a row I had rented that had an error (the first movie from two weeks ago slipped my mind at that moment). I asked if they could test the disc just to make sure the situation was actually the disc and not my electronics. He said they don’t have a DVD player in the store, other than the one that plays the preview videos on all the monitors hanging around in the store.

That’s odd. I remember back before DVDs, when Blockbuster rented VHS cassettes, they had players in the store. I remember returning one or two tapes with errors, and they checked them as I stood there telling them where the error occurred.

Now I’m going to have to play one of my personally owned DVD movies just to check that my players are working properly and hasn’t been causing the problems I’ve experienced with rented discs. I can’t imagine that my players would mess up in the same place on three perfectly good discs, but I wouldn’t have imagined getting three broken discs from Blockbuster within a two week period, either.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com