"How can I return a DVD that does not load onto my DVD player?"

his first feature by Andrei Zvyagintsev has the startling, irrepressible quality of the best débuts. A pair of brothers, young Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov) and the teen-age Andrey (Vladimir Garin), live peacefully in a fatherless household in a brackish backwater of what used to be the Soviet Union. In the midst of an idle summer, their father (Konstantin Lavronenko) turns up from nowhere and starts, with minimum benevolence, to reëstablish his authority. Andrey responds well to such tyranny, while Ivan, a mother's boy, glowers at the treacherous interloper. Most of the film takes place on a fishing trip, which ripples with threat and thrill alike; we know that it cannot end well for father and sons, but we hardly dare to wonder what form the calamity will take. Zvyagintsev gets formidable concentration from his youthful actors, and his storytelling moves with the simplicity-calm, chiselled, and suggestive-of a fable. In Russian. -Anthony Lane

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Should I return my HD DVD Player?
For christmas I got the Toshiba HD A3 player and loved it. But over the past week I've been starting to feel like the Blu Ray will win over HD DVD and that it would be a prudent decision to get a blu ray player. BTW, my mom got it from costco, so I can return it basically any time. So, should I return it and invest in a blu ray player? I was thinking since I'm a gamer I would get a PS3 since it's around the price range of other blue ray players and well... it plays other games my 360 doesn't play.

It's a shame, since I was really pulling for HD DVD and I was only able to watch 1 HD movie since I got my new A3 and I might have to return it. I didn't even send in for the free movies...
GongShow87 is offline Reply With Quote



MO, yes, return it and get a PS3. HD-DVD will be dead within a couple months (and like you it pains me to admit that, since although i am now 'purple', i've been red since april 2006 and wanted HD-DVD to win the format war).

Ah, format wars. The 1980's had the classic example of the consumer electronics show-down known as a "format war" when VHS and Beta both entered the market. VHS won that one, although Beta clung to a professional market for a very long time and can still be found in that market. In the mid-1990's, the industry was working on a 5" optical video disc and struggled to avoid a repeat of the VHS/Beta fiasco, eventually producing the wildly successful DVD. Even the DVD had a brush with format violence, though, when Circuit City teamed with a Hollywood law firm to create DIVX (not to be confused with the video codec DivX that appeared years later). Launched roughly a year and a half behind DVD, DIVX overlayed a "pay-per-view" sort of system onto the DVD format. Internet uproar over this competing format was so ferocious that DIVX was abandoned after less than nine months on the market, and DVD proceeded from there free from the burden of a format war. Not long afterward, though, two competing formats set out to replace the CD, and the DVD-Audio/SACD format war was born. The arrival of the iPod and iTunes Music Store combined with poor marketing from both sides and some problematic limitations on digital output hurt both formats, and at this point SACD has been relegated to "niche format" status while DVD-Audio is largely dead. And yet after all the pain and profit loss of past format wars, we still have another format war on our hands today. This time it's two high-definition 5" optical disc formats that are waging war against each other: HD-DVD and Blu-ray.

As I mentioned recently in my review of Toshiba's HD-A2 HD-DVD player, I was leery about buying into this new format war. My initial sense that Blu-ray had all the advantages faded quite a bit during 2007, as Toshiba's HD-DVD hardware support has been consistently solid and Blu-ray hardware has struggled for over a year now. Blu-ray players have suffered from slow load times on newer titles and from being limited to Blu-ray Profile 1.0, meaning that future titles would eventually start offering content that would be inaccessible to those players. The Playstation3 was an exception to many of these drawbacks, as it offered fast load times and rumored promises of a Profile 1.1 firmware update (and perhaps even a Profile 2.0 update eventually), but it also lacks bitstream output support for the new audio formats and a proper IR remote control (making home theater integration a pain). The BD30 was one of the very first standalone players to arrive that offered Profile 1.1 capability (via a firmware update to follow later and a user-furnished SD card), and it also was among the first to offer bitstream output of the new audio formats. When early reviews described video quality that matched or perhaps even bested the very best Blu-ray players (including the PS3) and load times that were close to those seen on the PS3, I decided that it was time to repeat a purchase made almost exactly nine years ago. In November 1998, I bought my first DVD player from Panasonic (a DVD-A310 that I still have sitting in a closet) and paid just under $500. In November 2007, I bought my first Blu-ray player, again from Panasonic and again for $500. It just seemed appropriate... As in my previous equipment reviews, you can find an equipment list at the end of this review.

You have not mentioned where did you purchase the DVD