"dangling entity" wrote in message
m

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...

Every once in
a while we have to clean one to get it to play flawlessly - maybe 4
per year of the 50-100 that we rent.

Well, I'm glad you have had such good experiences.


OTOH, one
innocuous looking scratch in just the right way can make 30 minutes of
a movie inaccessible.

I've seen a similar thing happen with CDs.

It's really frustrating. I'm sure you will be
quick to point out that my DVD player must be "trash" for me to have
such experiences, as I don't deny that the sophistication of
error-contingency and thus player quality enters into the scenario
somewhere along the line.

I've never pictured my Pioneer DV-525 as a paragon of sophistication.

I did not mean to give the impression that
I've had problem after problem with my setup. I haven't. In fact, it
is quite reliable and troublefree. However, there have been few
occasions in the past where seemingly surmountable disc blemishes turn
out to be anything but.

Nothing's perfect.

That's when I wonder if the format could have
been made just a bit more bulletproof.

It could have been, at a cost in playing time.

Then you compare that to the
worstly abused rental disc you've ever seen (which ends up playing
rather uneventfully, ironically), and you realize that DVD's are far
too naked to be safe from the careless rental customer (that got there
before you).

It's up to the rental store to make sure that the product they rent is
usable.

So it's pointless to worry about DVD, as the cat is
already out of the bag, but I hope future, more data-dense medium
formats are born with greater "abuse-contingency" in mind.

I think we've seen a lot of progress in making distribution formats more
reliable and abuse-proof. Compare and contrast the LP and the CD. Compare
and contrast VHS tape and DVD.

It's just
a wish. Yours may be different, I understand.