indiboi.com

I’ve been a Netflix customer/member since 2003. I’ve never had much trouble with the service, I can only remember one DVD that arrived damaged.

A month ago I switched to Blu-Ray.

Almost half of my Blu-Rays are arriving damaged. There is a characteristic crack at the edge, sometimes they’re still playable, sometimes they’re not. It’s the ones that aren’t that is really the problem, because they’ll play up to about an hour into the movie and then the picture will suddenly freeze.

It’s really a shame that Netflix is ignoring the problem. It seems to me, and quite frankly I’m certain of it, that Blu-Ray discs are just not as durable (or more precisely, not as flexible) as DVDs. This apparent brittleness makes them much more prone to damage when they pass through the USPS processing machinery. The result is that very distinctive crack at the edge.

Netflix could very easily resolve the issue by putting a thicker cardboard overwrap around the disc sleeve. Gamefly does this in order to avoid damage, but I suppose it simply isn’t cost effective since Blu-Ray renters are such a small portion of the overall customer base and even then not all areas of the country seem to be effected by this cracking.

To make matters worse when trying to discuss the issue on places like avscience.com, posters not experiencing the problem are typically adversarial and prone to blame the problem on the person experiencing it and refuse to put any blame on Netflix or the USPS. Bad luck and sabotage seem to be the only possible reasons, they’re not willing to consider that if hundreds of DVDs arrive okay, but a good portion of BDs arrive damaged, that perhaps it’s the BDs that are the defining variable. They’d much rather have you believe that the actual postman (not the machinery) is somehow able to determine that it’s a Blu-Ray and they’ll break only those, leaving DVDs okay, I’m personally insulted by the behavior there. Heaven forbid anyone suggest that Blu-Ray is imperfect in some way.

In any case, it looks like my days as a Netflix customer are coming to an end. It doesn’t matter where the blame lies at this point, I’m throwing my money away renting from Netflix when nearing the majority of my BDs are unplayable. I’m even considering just returning my Blu-Ray player; the thought of using Blockbuster, even with their online service, is quite repugnant.

My gender-bending Angelfish Oliver has died. She’s been ill, but undefinably so, thus accurate treatment wasn’t possible. Once the swelling begins it’s just a countdown until the end most of the time anyway. It’s one of those things… fish die, as does everything eventually, so I’m not really one to get terribly upset about it. The death is still distressing though, one additional little notch taken away from contentment and happiness.

It appears my Philips DVP-5990 DVD player is simply incompatible with my Monoprice 4×1 HDMI switch. I finally did get everything working by connecting my DVR & Blu-Ray player to the switch and the DVD player separately to the receiver. That’s not how I wanted to do it, but at least it works. I do wish I had paid more mind to the naysayers ranting about the limitation of 2 HDMI ports on the Yamaha 663 though. I may very well get a new receiver within the next year, because this switch business is quite annoying.

The Blu-Ray player is quite nice though, moreso for the lossless audio than the HD picture, sadly. I still haven’t really been blown away by anything HD. It seems that one simply needs HD to get a picture close to what SD is like on a smaller TV, it’s like this big scam on everyone. I suppose I could say that the differences between an upconverted DVD and a Blu-Ray are subtle at best. I also suppose I could say that the improvement is worth the $200 I spent on the player, but it certainly wouldn’t have been worth $300 or even the $450 that most of the standalone players cost. The improvement being worth $200 is a bit sketchy though, especially that I spent most of that $100 I saved on those damned HDMI cables and switch.

It’s just my little technological struggle… which I’d rather deal with than being social.

So my Monoprice switch and a couple of HDMI cables arrived today. I bought that so I could have my DVD player and Blu-Ray player connected to my AVR at the same time.

It seems one of the cables is faulty, whenever the DVD player switches to output 1080p there are video sparkles and the audio crackles. It doesn’t happen with the other cables, so I can conclude it isn’t the switch or the device, so… I just had to order another cable.

It’s annoying though, it’ll cost as much to return the cable as it would to just buy another one. The money spent on shipping the first one is lost forever, so I might as well just toss it in the trash. Granted, at least it isn’t one of those ridiculously expensive (for no reason other than they can) cables from a retail store.

It later occurred to me that if the cable would pass 1080i without issue, I could just swap the one from the DVR, but then… I’m not disparately in need of the DVD player (and the Blu-Ray player will play DVDs too). I’m also not thrilled about having a malfunctioning cable in the system anywhere. The funny thing is that the DVR’s HDMI cable could suffer from the same 1080p transmission problem anyway. Thankfully the other cables all seem to be fine. My new cables will ship tomorrow, so it’ll probably be Monday before I have them. I ordered more than one, just to be ahead of the game. One of them is just 3′ long, so that might be better to use for connecting the switch to the AVR anyway, 6′ of cable is quite unnecessary for that purpose.

With the dollar plummeting and the state of the economy quite uncertain, I have decided to join the American Dream of Debt. I had lived without credit card debt for a very long time, but no more.

At the end of February I bought a 42″ 1080p LCD television. I already had HD service from Comcast as part of my DVR. At the end of April I bought a new Audio/Video Receiver, out with the old HTiB… finally. New speakers and subwoofer were then purchased last month and finally (relatively) completed the project this past weekend by purchasing a Blu-Ray player.

The new home theater experience is thus quite impressive, far better than actually going to the theater. I’ve been considering add front projection next year, it would be nice to have a massive screen to view films on, though realistically for my own personal viewing pleasure the 42″ is large enough.