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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

My father passed away last year from complications due to Alzheimer's, but for years before he died, he struggled to work streaming services and modern "smart" TVs. We got him one of the few models of DVD players that we could actually still find and a lot of used DVDs because he _could_ use those.

OP here might be misremembering DVDs, here: the physical media skipped or froze intermittently and the players themselves were finicky; we ended up replacing it about three times in just as many years. Streaming services are overpriced, but they do _work_ consistently.

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> OP here might be misremembering DVDs, here: the physical media skipped or froze intermittently and the players themselves were finicky

In my teens my friends and I watched probably hundreds of DVDs, and they almost never had a problem. Skips & freezes were almost only ever a factor for highly scratched copies, more typical of those from Blockbuster than anything we picked up in the $5 bargain bins.

I don't think I've ever encountered a "finicky" player, either. I don't even know what that'd mean.

I have programmed well over hundreds of DVDs, and I can assure you, there were finicky players. Apex players were infamous on how cheap they were, and finicky is an appropriate word. DVD had a spec, and there were parts of the spec that Apex players did not do well at all. The spec allowed for random play. Apex players cheaped out on an PRNG type of ability and came with a saved preset list of random values. If you programmed a disc with random playback, it would playback exactly the same way every. single. time. It really sucked when we were programming games using the random feature. The spec allowed for 99 titles. Any where over 50 titles, and there was a better than not chance that an Apex player wasn't going to even recognize the disc. There were other quirks too, but I'm hoping the point was made

About half of the DVDs and Blu-rays I get from the library skip at some point in my PS5. They're usually not visibly scratched, though usually the scratches that matter are on the top not the bottom.

I started just ripping everything when the studios started adding unskippable ads... I had a rental copy of Friday, still have never actually seen it, there was a bad scratch and it froze after 30+ minutes of unskippable previews.

I've never had a really bad player though... I have seen players that had issues with burned disks, but not mfg (unless scratched rentals).

The only problem I've ever had with Blu-Ray players is that as the player gets older the trays eventually start having trouble ejecting. Other than that, I've never had one have any play trouble, even with scuffs on the discs.

Meanwhile, my streaming box randomly loses network connectivity, despite having a wired connection, and I have to restart it, before I can stream anything.

Okay I have dvd players that work fine even still. DVDs need care - scratches and fingerprints are bad (though the error correction on a good player will make it less noticeable). I think the lifespan of a dvd player may be in its design (where dust may get to the laser?) or the environment (humidity or temp may play a role?)

It's possible that DVD players are extremely low quality now, since there are very few people still buying them.

They are, after the second Walmart cheapass dvd player died, I bit the bullet and got an Xbox Series ProMax X 360 Copilot whatever.

It's a glorified blurry player, and it works fine as such.

As they say, you get what you pay for.

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