spoonyfork's Journal: Rental DVD Quality

Around this time of year I hit the local video rental store hard to catch up on all of the movies and TV shows I missed during the previous year. Several years ago I switched to only DVD because the video quality is much higher, they can contain bonus features, and I can play them on multiple devices. I remembered running into issues the last couple of years but I didn't make note of them. This year, 3 of the last 6 DVDs I've rented have had quality issues severe enough to interfere with the overall enjoyment of the video experience. The quality issues I am speaking of range from stuttering all the way to unable to read disc errors. They all appear to stem from damage done to the surface of the DVD itself such as a gouge or scratch. I was interested to find that the damaged disc had various levels of success when playing through the problem areas on the disc on different DVD players. The PlayStation was the worst. The iMac G5 and Dell P5 were a toss up as to whether or not the disc could play through.

I informed the rental store when I encountered an issue so someone else might not encounter the same problem. They did flag the discs and gave me in-store credit but I'd rather have a non-damaged disc.

I know the obvious solution is verify the quality of the DVD before renting it but some of these rentals had only one copy. Another solution would be to rent from a store with higher quality DVDs. That isn't very practical because of geography constraints. NetFlix and Blockbuster are certainly options but could have the same issues with less opportunity for immediate recourse.

Is this a provincial issue or have other people encountered an increased number of damaged discs from rental stores?

Kids movies the only ones I have had problems with

[nizo]

Probably because people let their kids scratch the daylights out of the disk when they insert it themselves (or play frisbee with it).