Page 1 of My first Dud DVD

Well! All the years I`ve been collecting movies, I`ve had dud VHS tapes in my time - irritating sparkly lines running down the picture because the tape`s creased and is causing a signal dropout, audio flapping between hi-fi stereo and mono because of bad tracking - all the nasty old foibles I thought I`d left behind with DVD.

After Wallace and Gromit and Toy Story Disk 3, I thought that DVD was an all or nothing deal. If a disk was badly authored, you`d had it.

Then last night I watched my gleaming new copy of "Evil Under The Sun" - you know the one, the third Agatha Christie that EMI did in the `70`s and `80`s. I`d got the new Anchor Bay R1 edition - original aspect ratio, trailer, 16 minute making-of doco. Beautiful. Or it was for the first eighteen chapters. In retrospect, I think it might have been skipping frames before then, but it was hard to tell. Then at the start of chapter nineteen the horror begins. Weird pixellation around characters, frames freezing and a small panel of action moving. Objects growing out of the foreheads of characters. Wow - when this format goes tits up, it really goes tits up.

I stopped the disk, cleaned it, cleaned the pickup lens on my Grundig and set it going again. It started up beautifully again, then I skipped to chapter nineteen from the menu. The words of the menu stayed on the screen, mixed in with the first frame of the chapter and the whole thing froze up. I managed to get things started again, but the weird pixellation was still happening, but not in exactly the same place. I could run a sequence five or six times and each time the mess on the picture was different. I tried other disks, and they ran perfectly. I tried the movie again and it still acted up. In fact the whole final six chapters of the movie were unwatchable. At one point, Maggie Smith`s eyes did something that would not have been out of place in The Exorcist.

So now the disk is waiting in a Jiffy bag to be posted back to Canada and I`ve had to rescue my VHS copy from the blank videos pile.

Ho hum.

Wow!

Well done, you are now a man! You have entered a new phase of your life, kinda of like getting smashed for the first time. Feel proud, feel strong, feel ALIVE.

Ahem.

I have still never had a duff disc apart from Ghost In The Shell R2 and Gladiator R2, but I think I am not alone with those.

Aye.

Ive got the World Is Not Enough which does that, am not impressed.
Anyone else got that problem?

Richard, I`ve not got the disc myself, but I just read a posting on another site (can`t remember which), from someone with this problem on TWINE. He said he had tried two different copies and had the same problem with each. I`ve not seen this mentioned anywhere else to date, so I wonder if it`s a player issue.

Hello SheepMan,
That was me, I think I posted one in Software, it sux, I suppose I deserve it for buying a nasty cheap player but you`ve got a right to expect it to play at least. Right?...

Blazingmonga what was wrong with your ghost in the shell

cos mine had the english audio track slioghtly out of sinc(cant spell it)

I think its just another problem with a mixture of player/dvd incompatibility. I had exactly the same problem with La Reine Margot on my Pioneer 717. Chapter 11 and everything starts going completely screwy. I tried it with a disc from Play247 & then Amazon but had same problem in roughly the same place. However, it played fine on my brother`s Sony and in-laws Wharfedale players.