Davis-area video stores

[ron_newman]

I'm probably the last one on my block to buy a DVD player. But now that I have it, I'm interested in hearing people's opinions of local video rental stores.

It looks like we have three choices: Hollywood Express on Elm Street, West Coast Video across the street, and Blockbuster in Porter Square.
My first impressions:

Hollywood Express -- largest selection, best chance of finding something obscure

Blockbuster - very liberal rental terms: a '2 day' rental is really 9 days, a 7-day is really 14 days. A lot more foreign and independent films than I would have expected, though probably not in the same league as Hollywood Express

West Coast Video -- why is this store still in business? I don't see any obvious reason to go here.

Comments

[ron_newman]

is it possible that your DVD player is the real problem? One out of three sounds quite excessive.

[yangelina.livejournal.com]

We have DVD players in the house plus a xbox and we would try on all of them, in the beginning. A couple of times we even did what they suggested, cleaning with soap/water. Now we just give up and send them back.

[yangelina.livejournal.com]

(oops) we have three DVD players in various computers.

[clevernonsense.livejournal.com]

one thing to try: note the time it freezes, then go to scene selection and select the next scene, then rewind until a few seconds after the freezepoint. That's worked for us.

I've only had a couple netflix movies freeze that way, both times we got around it.

[yangelina.livejournal.com]

On the main computer that we use, the discs completely kill the machine and we have to force reboot (we have tried the skipping over bad parts trick, too). We do suspect that it is that particular DVD player that is causing most of the problem (playing those bad discs on our other computers only locks up the software instead of crashing completely), except it doesn't explain why none of the DVDs we get from Hollywood Express ever had any problems playing in that same computer.
It's a bummer, but man, is Netflix convenient.

[ron_newman]

do you also have a just-plain DVD player (as opposed to a computer that plays DVDs) ?

[yangelina.livejournal.com]

xbox is the closest thing we have to that, with all these gadgets we felt it unecessary to have a stand alone DVD player.
I'm still not entirely convinced that it's the DVD players we have, since the stuff we rent from Hollywood Express always play just fine.
Ah well.