Monday, October 15, 2007

a little mad sometimes

This is going to sound like the setup for a meme, even though it's not. What was the first DVD you ever bought? Go ahead and post your answer in the comments. About nine years ago I chose one of the all-time classics, "Psycho," as my first disc. At the time I didn't have a DVD player but I had just gotten a DVD-ROM drive for our family computer. I loved the idea that technology had progressed to the point where I could keep a permanent copy of one of my favorite movies. It wasn't on a tape that could get erased or on film that could decay. This was a digital video disc with Hitchcock's masterpiece converted to bits and bytes, preserved forever in plastic.

Last week Perry Simon posted a link to an interesting blog about the battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray Discs. The author points out that consumers have resisted replacing their DVD collections and are mainly buying only new releases in the new formats. Like most people I am in no rush to buy a machine in either format. I already made that mistake years ago when I bought a Betamax VCR.

Cut to the present day. My son has to do a presentation on movie villains for his speech class. The other students in his group are covering Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter. My son is reporting on Norman Bates. I told him a few things that I remembered about "Psycho" from the Intro to Film class I took when I was his age. My high school teacher, Mr. Naversen, took us through the famous shower scene frame by frame, being careful not to melt the film on the projector bulb.

We got my copy of the "Psycho" Collector's Edition DVD from its cool, dry place and placed it into the fancy Onkyo DVD changer that we got last year. The machine couldn't read the disc! Then we tried it in the Sony DVP-NS50P in our family room. Still nothing. As a last resort, we put the disc into a couple of laptop computers to no avail. What on earth could have happened to this nine-year-old disc that made it unreadable in all my machines? I tried cleaning it with a soft cloth but that didn't make any difference. Has the technology changed? Is my "Psycho" obsolete? Why won't it work and what can I do about it?

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3 Comments:

Anonymous Missyb64 said...

Our first was "The Outlaw Josie Wales". Why? "Because a buzzard's got to eat same as a worm."

10/16/2007  
Anonymous Lance said...

My first DVD was South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut (the title is even a penis joke).

This site has a wealth of info on DVD's.

http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#1.41

10/16/2007  
Blogger Steve Barden said...

I also owned a DVD movie before ever owning a DVD player. Mine was Blazing Saddles. My computer also had a DVD-Rom drive but the computer wasn't actually powerful enough to play the movie! I had to wait months until I got a real DVD player to finally watch this disc. The player, a Sony, cost about $750. I bought a player last year at Target for $25.

10/16/2007  

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