Rental DVD's - Am I asking too much?

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martyyn

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#128815 24-Aug-2013 12:50

In the last couple of months I've been encouraging my kids to rent DVD's on a regular basis from our local shop.

The problem is very few of them will actually play on our HTPC. Every one has had I/O problems or 'interpretation check' errors all suggesting a poor disc.

I've cleaned them myself, I've gone back for replacements but we would be lucky to watch half the films we rent. We used Fatso a number of years ago with little to know trouble, in fact I think only one gave us grief and the replacement was fine.

So should I expect better or is this how it is these days ? Rental discs are just poor.

I should update by sig to show what Im using but its all good with everything else.

Cheers

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#883846 24-Aug-2013 13:07

People simply do not take care of DVDs. I've lent movies to people and had them come back covered with fingerprints etc, so I'm not at all surprised to find prints, scratches etc all over rental ones. I don't even bother with them anymore...

NonprayingMantis

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#883848 24-Aug-2013 13:11

Is that where you take a movie you downloaded off the Internet and store it on a disc?

1080p

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#883879 24-Aug-2013 14:31

Check the discs before you leave the store. Ask the staff to try playing them before you take them home if you think they might not work.

freitasm

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#883914 24-Aug-2013 16:10

Have you actually tried a new disc on your HTPC to make sure it's not a problem on the drive itself?

tchart

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#883929 24-Aug-2013 16:37

Our last remaining store in Porirua is anal about their discs. They check them before you leave and charge you $5 per disc if they return scratched. A few times I've dropped the discs off - in the drop off slot - only to be stung with a fee next time I return. I now make them check the discs in front of me.

Inphinity

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#883955 24-Aug-2013 17:27

I'm confused, what's a DVD? ;)

Sounds more likely your drive in your HTPC, to be honest. Yes, rental discs get scuffed up etc, but unless your local shop is particularly poor most of them are pretty good about keeping track.

Have you tried the problematic discs in another drive, that is perhaps more tolerant of read errors (some drives are particularly poor at error tolerance).

All I can say is, streamed media is far less hassle than fluffing around with renting DVDs :P

martyyn

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#884865 26-Aug-2013 17:07

Thanks everyone, I've tried new discs with no problems, I can even play 'older' discs I know to work with no trouble. It's just the last lot of DVD's we've had from the rental store.

The same discs don't work in other PC drives, I was just wondering if this was a common occurrence with rental discs being a poor quality now the prices are so cheap. We can rent half a dozen recent movies for less than $20 these days so I don't know how they make any money.

The disc surface on the last one we had looked fine. I cleaned it careful but it would still only play to a certain point in the movie and then stop.

I tried playing it through Mediaportal and VLC.

Maybe it's just the drive being less tolerant than it used to be (by design or fault). We only ever had one problem with Fatso discs and had hundreds of movies through them.

Cheers

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RunningMan

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#884873 26-Aug-2013 17:35

Tried cleaning the lens on your drive(s)?

Hammerer

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#884878 26-Aug-2013 17:49

martyyn: ... I/O problems or 'interpretation check' errors all suggesting a poor disc. ...

What is your HTPC software? If you're using Windows these sorts of errors can also be due to incorrect or corrupted drivers and this is far more likely to be the case on Windows XP.

Other than driver problems, I've only seen IO errors with failing drives. I've not had it from scratched disks or dirt/hair over the lens. The hair over the lens can be a hard one to find because the hair may not appear over the lens until the drive spins up.

martyyn

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#888158 2-Sep-2013 10:38

Got a bluray drive from them this weekend and no problems at all.

To answer the last couple of questions, I havent tried cleaning the lense and Im running W7 and Mediaportal for the DVD's. It's been like that for years and always worked very well.

I'll keep trying and maybe a pattern will emerge to let me know what the problem is.

Thanks for the suggestions.

jarledb

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#888186 2-Sep-2013 11:22

Wow, can't even remember the last time I rented a DVD, and I get flashbacks to working at 7-Eleven in my early days and renting out huge VHS-players with the VHS tapes.

So happy I can do everything from the comfort of my sofa these days. AppleTV and an american account and its faster, cheaper and better than going to a DVD-shop to rent them (I think, what is the typical price for renting a DVD?)

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jonherries

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#888190 2-Sep-2013 11:26

jarledb: Wow, can't even remember the last time I rented a DVD, and I get flashbacks to working at 7-Eleven in my early days and renting out huge VHS-players with the VHS tapes.

So happy I can do everything from the comfort of my sofa these days. AppleTV and an american account and its faster, cheaper and better than going to a DVD-shop to rent them (I think, what is the typical price for renting a DVD?)

I am one of the (many based on the forums) people for whom movie downloads on an apple tv takes forever (not literally but long enough that it has to run over night before playing).

It is jailbroken, but surely punishment for this would be not being able to DL, rather than making it painfully slow...

Jon

martyyn

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#888203 2-Sep-2013 11:35

The reason were doing it is because my wife still likes to go to the store and chose something, for some reason it seems to give her a sense of 'occasion' and we want the kids to learn the value of putting their pocket money together and making a joint decision which all three can agree on.

It's only a couple of dollars, but the lesson is more important than anything else and it also gets them off the couch and on their bikes to get to the store in the first place.

I have a full blown HTPC and dont want an AppleTV with all that comes with setting it up.

gehenna

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#888211 2-Sep-2013 11:49

I stopped using rental outlets after they came after me with a debt collection agency. I'll add they went to this extreme without even trying to make contact with me.

I dropped a DVD back a few days late and said (as I'm sure we all do) to myself I'll pay the fine next time I rent something. The I completely forgot about it and didn't go back for ages because hey, it's a brick and mortar shop - i only ever go there once or twice a year. Turns out they weren't willing to wait until my next visit to recoup their $10 so they got heavy on it.

Hey I can understand that you have a process and the end of the process is to try and recoup your loss through a recovery service, but the fact they made no attempt to follow up with me prior to employing the agency is what pissed me off.

And that's the last time I'll ever use a physical movie rental service other than Fatso. In my opinion they have sealed their own fate.

sen8or

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#890818 6-Sep-2013 11:27

I can't speak for your local store, however for my store (own rental franchise) -

All discs should be checked on the way in and the way out. I say should as casual staff may not be as fussy as I am, its a constant battle.

Out of the 2-3000 discs hired per week, we would have 1-2 complaints every few weeks about non playability. Sometimes its easy to look at the disc and say yup, scratched, sorry about that etc etc etc, othertimes, not so much (EG new release disc, first time ever hired with playback problems). Ofcourse Blu-ray has introduced more issues with player firmware updates released to keep up with features / encoding on discs (had an issue myself with Jack the Giant Slayer not playing at all on my Panasonic BD player until I updated firmware), but ofcourse, "the disc is always scratched, all our other discs play fine".

"In general" customers with persistent problems use non standard (or warehouse branded) DVD players (laptops, ps2s, DVD recorders, computers etc) with normal DVD players having fewer issues. If you have more than the occaisional issue let the store owner know. Its a challenging industry as it is without people being discouraged through scratched discs.

As for the value, it is still one of the best value home entertainment options around. Most rental stores have $1 days for their catalog movies (for us, this includes DVDs or Blu-ray), cheap days for new releases, and various other discount deals etc.

You go out to work, You go out to get groceries, You go out to do all sorts of stuff, but won't go out to rent a movie? In saying that, I have Netflix / unblock US at home and would only rent new release Blu-ray blockbusters if I didn't own my own store so I can sort of understand the streaming thing a bit.

And being chased for $10? Is a bit low. we set the limit at $20, unfortunately, most rental stores dont have the time or the skills to effectively collect debt from customers that aren't active. We are a medium sized store, when I last looked at it, we had over $50k in debt from people who had simply not been into the store (that doesn't include the debt from people who deliberately did not return product), quite a chunk of income to be missing. I can appreciate no one likes being told they owe money

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