{"id":206,"date":"2008-04-01T16:50:07","date_gmt":"2008-04-01T06:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/2008\/04\/01\/the-pianist-i-have-no-luck-with-this-movie-part-1\/"},"modified":"2008-04-01T16:50:07","modified_gmt":"2008-04-01T06:50:07","slug":"the-pianist-i-have-no-luck-with-this-movie-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/2008\/04\/01\/the-pianist-i-have-no-luck-with-this-movie-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pianist &#8211; I have no luck with this movie &#8211; Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is going to be very similar to\u00a0my earlier\u00a0&#8220;<a rel=\"bookmark\" href=\"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/2008\/01\/28\/my-xbox-360-just-died-part-1\/\" title=\"Permanent Link to My Xbox 360 Just Died - Part 1\">My Xbox 360 Just Died<\/a>&#8221; series of blogs, as I attempt to find a solution to a problem. As I mentioned in the Xbox 360 article, having problems is like honey for a bear to blogs &#8230; if everything worked the way they should, then there would be nothing to complain about, and hence, no blogs.<\/p>\n<p>Let me first explain what I mean when I say I have no luck with this movie.\u00a0Several years ago, I purchased (from Canada, of all places) my copy of The Pianist on DVD (the Canadian version was superior to the US version).\u00a0I seem to remember it played perfectly when I first got it,\u00a0but\u00a0much later on, I discovered that\u00a0whole sections of the movie would not play, most likely due to one small scratch on the disc. I&#8217;m normally very careful with handling DVDs, and I had\u00a0maintained a perfect record of not having a single DVD that wasn&#8217; t fully playable out of a collection of about 300\u00a0movies back then. The collection is now\u00a0500, and The\u00a0Pianist on DVD remains the only\u00a0disc that is problematic.<\/p>\n<p>So in the recent HD DVD sales, I decided to pick\u00a0up a copy of\u00a0The Pianist on HD DVD for the discount price of $USD 11.50, thinking this was a good\u00a0buy\u00a0to get a\u00a0well working copy of the movie (in HD too,\u00a0plus extra features that I don&#8217;t have on DVD). I purchased the disc from <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.dvdpacific.com\/\">DVD Pacific<\/a>, my first purchase from this store, but I had heard many good things about them. Anyway, a few weeks later I received my discs and as I normally do, I test the discs upon receiving them to make sure they&#8217;re all in working order. The Pianist HD DVD did not look different to any other HD DVD movies I had purchased &#8211; it was shrink wrapped, it has the sticker labels on top that wasn&#8217;t damaged, and the case itself was in perfect condition. But upon taking the disc out to look at the disc surface, I was horrified. This is what I saw:<a href=\"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/the_pianist_scratches.jpg\" title=\"The Pianist HD DVD - Horror Scratches!\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/the_pianist_scratches.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/the_pianist_scratches_sm.jpg\" alt=\"The Pianist HD DVD - Horror Scratches!\" style=\"border: #000000 1px solid\" title=\"The Pianist HD DVD - Horror Scratches!\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Obviously this disc was not going to be playable.<\/p>\n<p>So out of the 500 movies I own, only two discs have suffered damage and both of them happen to be The Pianist? What&#8217;s going on here?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve read some forums posts that detailed similar problems that was solved easily by washing the disc, and I tried doing just that. The scratches appeared better, but it still wasn&#8217;t what you would call a disc in &#8220;good&#8217; condition:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/the_pianist_scratches_washed.jpg\"><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/04\/the_pianist_scratches_washed_sm.jpg\" alt=\"The Pianist HD DVD - Washed\" style=\"border: #000000 1px solid\" title=\"The Pianist HD DVD - Washed\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Anyway, a quick email to DVD Pacific and they replied very promptly, with instructions on how to send the damaged disc back and get a replacement (for which I will get reimbursed for the postage costs). I went to the post office and got one of those CD\/DVD mailer boxes, and the required $4 stamp.<\/p>\n<p>I will send out the disc tomorrow and then I&#8217;ll update the situation as it changes. Hopefully, it won&#8217;t be too long before I get back a copy of The Pianist that actually works perfectly (now that would be a first for me!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is going to be very similar to\u00a0my earlier\u00a0&#8220;My Xbox 360 Just Died&#8221; series of blogs, as I attempt to find a solution to a problem. As I mentioned in the Xbox 360 article, having problems is like honey for a bear to blogs &#8230; if everything worked the way they should, then there would [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-high_definition_dvd"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pzVMv-3k","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.digital-digest.com\/blog\/DVDGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}