DVD
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DVD

New 2005-01-05: Check out this rant page about lending DVD's: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/vze26qhz/blockbustered.htm

Simply the most exciting new media to hit entertainment technology in the last 20 years!  The best way to watch movies at home!

What's so great about DVD's (a completely arbitrary list):

  • CD size media
  • No rewinding
  • Interactive menus
  • Widescreen presentation for most titles
  • Additional features on most discs (trailers, cast/crew biographies, deleted/alternate scenes, games, web links, etc.)
  • Dolby Digital surround sound, and sometimes DTS surround sound as well
  • Multiple language tracks
  • Multi-language captioning, in addition to standard closed captioning
  • Doesn't decay with each viewing like video tape does
  • Anamorphic widescreen presentation for those lucky enough to have 16x9 televisions, giving double the screen resolution of standard sets.

Resources:

http://www.thedigitalbits.com - a great source of day to day information about what's happening in the DVD world

http://netflix.com - After buying too many discs, you learn that you can't buy every disc.  You can rent DVD from almost any video store, but if you're like me, you never seem to find time to watch the disc before it's due back.  NetFlix solves this problem - you pay a relatively low monthly fee ($20) and get to keep 4 discs at a time for as long as you want.  You maintain a queue (list) of what you want to see on their site.  When you return a disc, they send you the next available disc on your list.  You can pay them to keep more discs at a time if you want.  They also have a service to pick discs for you based on your ratings of things you've seen.  And best of all, they have everything that's on DVD (except XXX), unlike most video stores.  Looking for that great foreign film that all the critics picked as the best movie of the year?  NetFlix has it.  Looking for that racy movie that your wife doesn't want you to watch.  NetFlix has it!  As you can tell, I love this service!

http://imdb.com - The Internet Movie DataBase, an hyperlinked amazement of information about movies, TV shows, actors, directors and more.  This is the place to go if you want to know who was in what, and what else they were in.

http://tvguide.com - In deference to my friend Larry, who thinks this is the best place for movie information.  Certainly the standard bearer for television information, with a very decent movie database with reviews as well.

[This page is no longer maintained.]

Revised 07/30/2008