simont | (no subject)

Arrgh! If this goes on for another week or so, I'm going to get to the point where I jump up and down and scream if anyone so much as mentions Babylon 5. Which, given that it's one of my favourite pieces of television and has managed to come closer to turning me into a sad fanboy than anything else I can think of, would be a terrible shame.

My second replacement set of season 3 arrived in the post this morning. Black Star had not messed about; it was enclosed in two padded envelopes, wrapped in bubblewrap inside that, held together with a rubber band under that, and additional bubblewrap had been placed between the folding disc holders to make quintuply sure it didn't rattle around in transit. I was impressed.

Unfortunately, one disc was still not properly seated. I'm confident that Black Star's extreme precautions had prevented it rattling around while in the post to me, but I suspect it had rattled a little bit before it reached Black Star in the first place, because it still had two small scratches on it. And it's the same disc as one of the scratched ones in the first replacement set, which means I can't even put together a clean set by exchanging discs between the two!

These scratches are pretty small, though, and might be harmless. I'm probably going to have to watch disc 3 again this evening to make sure. And that irritates me in itself, because at this rate I'm going to have watched the whole season several times in a stupid order by the time I get round to showing it to my friends – and that means that doing that won't be nearly as much fun for me as I'd intended it to be.

I'm sure I shouldn't be this upset; it's only a TV series, after all. But it makes me very angry that what ought to have been a source of nothing but pleasure, for me and for four or five other people, has instead stretched into a two-week stress trip and completely spoiled my fun. And it makes me angrier still that I can't rant at the people who are actually responsible for the problem, because Black Star aren't them.

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You're not the only person to have been having problems with this particular set of discs - I know at least two other people who've ordered it and had problems with scratched/loose discs.

Indeed, and Owen said the copies in HMV had similar problems.

In fact, I've just found a news article on the subject. It's certainly not just me!

Okay, forgive me if this is a dumb question, but: is this set of DVDs something that you could walk into a real actual real-life shop and buy? That way you could check the discs before you actually buy them, and not have to go through the whole delayed process of returning and re-ordering each time...

Yes, I've considered that several times. But Black Star have mostly been lovely about this and I don't want to take my business elsewhere if I can avoid it, and also I'm unconvinced that it would help - Owen said he'd gone into town and had a look in HMV, and all their copies rattled similarly.

I'm keeping it as a last-ditch option if all else fails.

Also, the shop would have to sell non-plastic-wrapped boxes for this plan to work, otherwise you get home, open the plastic and have exactly the same problem as before.

Well, you *could* buy it, immediately open it in the shop and sort it out straight away.

I found the first 20 minutes of (I think) the second episode on disc 2 of

grahamb's season 3 boxset completely unplayable. Lots of coding errors and it crashed the DVD player at one point. The discs seemed well seated in the box though, and I couldn't see any scratches (which given the way CDs and DVDs are encoded *shouldn't* be that much of a problem anyway) so I suspect it's just a poor quality pressing. I had similar problems on a couple of the X Files discs too.

You're not getting the R1s why, now?

It's generally more convenient to have R2 discs in an R2 country, I think. It makes it easier if I want to lend them to someone, for example. (Which happens a lot at the moment; I'm showing these to a group of about five people, and quite often one of them can't make it and has to borrow a disc to catch up. At least some of those people don't have multi-region players.)

If I couldn't get R2 at all, I wouldn't hesitate to buy R1.

At least some of those people don't have multi-region players.

But do they have a chunk of HD space and a halfway decent ripping app? The former's cheap and the latter's free. Throw the patched VOBs into software player of choice, and Robert is your parent's sibling.

At least some of the R1 B5 is reportedly all-region, so standards would be the issue moreso than region crippling on standalone players. (Many crippled standalones will do PAL-60, though, for reasons I've never been clear on.)

The idea of R2 being more convenient in an R2 country is not something which would occur to me, though. I can't imagine anyone in this country deliberately opting for a region-crippled player of any sort when region-free ones are available on the high street and it's a piece of piss to buy from other regions.

Further, I've gotten the impression that the effects transfers were better handled on the R1 sets, which is why I'll be pursuing the S1-3 R1 metabox should finances allow (especially after seeing just how bad the effects transfers were on the R2/4 S1 set's first pressing!).

The hard disk option isn't what you want if you have a 15" monitor attached to a computer with a hard chair in front of it in one room, and a 30"ish telly in front of an enormous comfy sofa in the other! I know you keep a computer near the TV and sofa for exactly this purpose, but it's not everyone's setup...

As for deliberately opting for a region-crippled player: there is one very common region-crippled DVD player, which is the PS2. If you already have one of those for purposes of playing games, there's no need to buy a separate DVD player unless some awkward soul goes and lends you an R1 DVD :-)

But...but...but there are region workarounds for the PS2... and PS2s can and should be chipped, because who the hell wants to restrict themselves to the dismal UK games market and its Dancing Stage and its horrid release delays and its occasionally castrated games ... and...and...and... *splut*

The hard disk option may not be ideal, but it does the job. (And I get around the "hard chair" problem in the bedroom by either switching chairs or using the bed.)