One night before we moved in together we were watching Moulin Rouge on DVD in his room when it suddenly conked out halfway through. Attempts to use a cleaning disc were thoroughly unsuccessful and so we were prompted to invest in a Blu-ray player (a whole £99.99) which made sense at the time as my family had recently bought one so it meant we could also watch films they'd bought.
And so our Blu-ray collection began to grow.
And it's carried on growing and growing. I like to get all Disney or CG animated films, plus any which have a lot of special effects. We still buy DVDs, but we've even started getting some films on Blu-ray because those like Game of Thrones are just made for watching in higher quality. Just over a week ago we'd added another five films to our collection (thank you HMV for having nice offers when we have hospital appointments).
Saturday before last we had a first aid duty, but it wasn't until the afternoon so we settled down to watch an episode of ER while we ate our lunch. Except the Blu-ray player just said 'Load Error' and spat the disc out. We tried it again, and again. We tried the cleaning disc, and the Blu-ray player just said 'Load Error' and spat that out too. Eventually we established that after many years of faithful service our Blu-ray player had died.
I promptly ordered a new one from Amazon. We then decided that we didn't want to wait that long for it to be delivered and headed down town to see if anyone there was selling one. One of the electrical shops was (and for only £10 more than what we were paying from Amazon) so we took it home and hooked it all up.
Only to find a picture which was covered in little sparkly dots, like a mini snow-storm. We tried changing all manner of settings, we read the manual and did Google searches. And what it basically boiled down to is that although the ten-year-old HD Ready TV works with a six-year-old Blu-ray played connected through the HDMI socket, it's not HDCP compatible which is something newer Blu-ray players have. The HDCP is something to do with copy protection and is supposed to stop people from watching illegally copied films or something. Unfortunately as older TVs don't have this, it means they don't work with modern Blu-ray players.
From what I could find online the choices were to buy a new TV or buy an old Blu-ray player. I was more than a bit peeved about this because by this point we owned two Blu-ray players (neither of which we could actually use) and a perfectly good TV (apart from the fact that it wouldn't work with either of the perfectly good Blu-ray players).
To begin with I was dead against the new TV option, instead suggesting that we could just buy a cheap DVD player until the TV packing in and then buy all new equipment. Until Mr Click pointed out that doing this would render a large portion of our film collection unwatchable for some time. So we had to buy a new TV. Thank goodness for Father-in-Laws with credit cards!
I arrived home from work last Tuesday to find it all set up and looking incredible. And after saying we didn't want a TV in the bedroom, we've moved the old one into the bedroom. We used to watch an episode of a TV series in bed on my laptop before we went to sleep each night. Now we can watch it on my in-laws' old DVD player on a bigger screen.
The second Blu-ray player we have given to my in-laws because they already have a super-duper TV (and it means we can bring our films to watch with them - there are so many Disney films my Mum-in-Law has wanted to watch but which we couldn't share with her because we only have them on Blu-ray).
In a way it's all worked out pretty well. Even if it has been a bit of an unnecessary expense.
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