XBox != Good DVD Player

This post is in relation to an item I am adding to my “What Do You Want” list on the sidebar.

I do not currently have a DVD Player. I do have an XBox. When I bought the XBox, it was a combination replacement for my that-day-dead DVD Player and fulfilment of my desire to play a few XBox games. So, when I bought it ($300), I also bought the DVD Player kit ($40) (and an extended warranty, which with tax brought my XBox to just over $400; you can go buy one now for $179 with the DVD kit and two games included). For a time, it played DVDs adequately, but now … now… Sigh.

I like to pop a DVD into the XBox and let it run on the TV behind me while I work on the computer. While my computer can play DVDs (more on that in just a sec), running it on the TV is a bigger picture, and doesn’t take up any screen “real-estate” on my computer, and doesn’t take up any CPU resources, which is often more important to me (not that my computer is particularly underpowered, but that all but the top five supercomputers on Earth are seriously underpowered for me). But there’s a problem. My XBox, since I got it back this year from my family, has a problem playing movies. If there is the slightest fingerprint anywhere on the disc, it will skip and freeze and sometimes lock up completely. If there is the tiniest scratch, it will never make it through the disc. But worse, even with a perfectly clean, unscratched DVD, the XBox … when it gets about an hour into any disc, begins to skip and jump and lock up. In the last couple of months, I’m not sure I’ve had a single disc get past 1:15 before the whole XBox was frozen and needed to be shut down. Sometimes restarting the XBox helps, but usually not.

So then I move the disc to my iMac, and no matter whether it was the time or a scratch (or a lot of scratches) or fingerprints or whatever, the Apple DVD Player plays it fine. I have never seen the sort of trouble my XBox gives me on my iMac. It plays it fine, 1/4 size (what I usually do if I’m doing other things on the computer), 1/2 size (when I’m waiting for a page to load or a file to upload or such, but want a better look at the movie), or full screen. The only time I ever see any disturbance is sometimes when I’m running a dozen other applications at once and using a ridiculous amount of bandwidth, it drops a few frames. So, it works, and while frustrating, I get to see the end of the movies.

Which gets me finally to my point. I do not have an effective DVD player. I would like one. When I can afford one, I will buy one. If you happen to come across an extra DVD player, hey, keep me in mind.

(I love the idea of an “extra” DVD player.)