You know it's Friday when

[altivo]

...you can't keep your eyes open any more.

I gave in this week and reactivated Netflix. Gary's been wanting me to do it for a while now. They sent a letter offering two weeks free and saying they still had and would restore our queue. The latter turned out only to be partly true. Yes, they still had the records of what we had rented and how we rated it, but no, they didn't have the list of things we were still planning to see.

Even less impressive: the first disc they sent was the wrong one (didn't match the label on the sleeve) and was so defective it wouldn't play. At this rate, they'll be cancelled again before they can bill me.

We were going to go out for dinner and shopping tonight after work, but neither of us felt like it. Stayed in instead, made dinner here. Tomorrow: guild meeting.

Comments

[aureth.livejournal.com]

I've had a Netflix subscription for five or six years now, and have had maybe two or three bad discs. And not one in over a year.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We had Netflix before for at least three years. I don't remember ever getting a dirty or defective DVD, but had many problems with the disc not matching the sleeve. This happens with the library too, with people who check out several at once and apparently just can't be bothered to put them back into the correct containers. We do check and fix that when they are returned. Then there are the people who keep the DVD and put some old music CD into the box. I don't know whether they are just spacey or really trying to get away with it.

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

My son had Netflix- they had an impressive reliability rate, here. I have no idea how they're organized, though, as I've heard complaints from other people as well.

The Librarys' DVDs are iffy. I never know when I order one whether or not it will play. I prerfer VHS, when available, because they rarely fail to work properly, but the branches are weeding them out, and nothing 'new' is available.

And now everyone is looking for Blu-Ray...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, people treat library CDs and DVDs as if they were cheap coasters or even kid toys. I'm constantly amazed at the condition in which they are returned.

What really gets me is when someone comes in and makes a big fuss about how a DVD won't play (acting as if they had actually paid for it) and you flip it over and it's covered with greasy fingerprints. How much sense does it take to clean that off before complaining?

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

*snickers* it's the most common solution. I had one returned with peanut butter on it.

There is that 'my taxes paid for this free- to-borrow DVD' mentality, too. We have a full time person who spends half her day running these through the cleaner/re-surfacer just to try to stay ahead of the mess. My personal observation is that a DVD goes out about five times before the complaining over skipping begins :o(

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Sounds about right. Yet I have DVDs in my personal collection that have been played dozens of times and are still perfect. It only takes the tiniest amount of care.

I've seen the peanut butter too. At least, I hope it was peanut butter. What appears to be women's makeup or hand lotion is another common mess.

VHS is worse though. We've stopped adding them, even when we receive them still in the shrink wrap as gifts. I suspect that the players out there are deteriorating and unmaintained now, so often I find that a tape goes out only once and comes back broken or stretched.

What brand of resurfacer do you use for DVDs? We have a small inexpensive one, but it's pretty ineffective. I've been looking at better ones, but I'm not convinced that they will work well enough to justify the cost.

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

I'll look at the name tomorrow. It supposedly warms the surface of the disc to make it malleable and aid in scratch repair, but anything deep that catches your nail remains after processing. We burned out our first one of these and they bought a larger model.

Our biggest VHS problem is with broken doors (that hinged flap over the exposed tape). I keep the cast-aways for parts for these. I've had the fun of replacing almost every component of the tapes, even switching out the reels (tape included) as well as snipping off ruined leaders and reattaching tape to the reels.

[flamekist.livejournal.com]

Our experience with Netflix is fairly positive. We've never had a DVD in the wrong sleeve, but we get 1-2 disks a month that are damaged beyond viewing. I found a solution for cleaning disks with minor scratches. I use an old eyeglass cleaning cloth with a drop of Old English furniture polish, then buff it really well. It generally works for the minor scratches, but not the deeper ones.

When we first joined Netflix, I really didn't think we'd use it that much and that we'd drop it from disuse. But today we have close to 100 DVDs in our que.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We watched several years' worth before finding ourselves just too busy to sit through a film. The disks would sit here for weeks at a time, so in essence I was paying rent that exceeded the price of buying them sometimes. That was when I canceled.

The other issue we had from time to time was selection. Our interests are pretty far away from the mainstream apparently. Many of the things we wanted to see were only available in one or two copies, and we'd wait for months to get them. A couple of times the disk was lost or destroyed before it ever got to us and the title became "unavailable." We had a lot of BBC dramatizations (not the comedies, which are immensely popular) and PBS documentaries in our queue, as well as quite a few silent film classics (those almost always had a long wait.)

Getting the wrong disc in the sleeve was a frequent problem, as the BBC and PBS series invariably involve numerous discs. Watching them out of order really doesn't work for us.