Rebecca and I purchased a lot of DVDs in
The catch is that they are all bootlegged. Imagine walking into a store that is selling nothing but bootlegged DVDs. Imagine that this could be your job, bootlegging DVDs and selling them for $2 each.
Even though we checked out each DVD we purchased on the store DVD player to make sure it was more than just an empty DVD, once we got them home onto our machine, some of them didn't work. Here's where this blog post would get real technical if I were a technical guy. But I'm not. If there is an opposite to a techno-geek, (something like a techneophyte), I'm it. Light switches are as complicated as I dare to get. I let Rebecca handle everything else. Whenever my guy friends get into discussions about digital versus HDTV, or how many channels they get, or pistons versus spark plugs or some such idiocy, I do my best to stay out of the conversation so as not to be emasculated.
But, to put our DVD issue in layman's terms, the problem seems to be that certain DVDs are made for certain places in the world and they won't play in other places. Don't ask me how they know where they are. I can't remember if it's the formatting of the DVD itself, the wiring of the DVD player, or what, but a bunch of the DVDs that we purchased in Ecuador are useless to us here except as coasters.
I brought two music DVDs in
Since it's nearly pointless to watch a concert video without sound, I started pushing buttons and somehow got myself to a screen that had "Audio" as an option. That sounded like just the fix that I needed so I selected it and lo and behold, I found myself on a screen with an option to select a different type of TV. Not a different model, but some different frequency or something. The techno-geek in me remembered something from a past conversation about T.V.'s being the root of the problem, so I selected the other T.V. from the one that was already selected and all hell broke loose.
The screen started rolling from top to bottom at great speed. Static lines started moving diagonally across the screen. The only sound you could hear was the war cry of the Bohemian Wahoo. This sudden change into techno-anarchy made it impossible to read the words to undo whatever the hell it was I had just done. Crap, I thought. More indiscriminate button pushing didn't help. Fuck, I thought. Something that started out with so much promise ended up completely fucked up.
In a last ditch effort to salvage some shred of manhood, I took the Stones DVD out and put in a DVD that I know works in our player - something Made in China but sold in the USA - held my breath and encountered the same problem. The screen rolled from top to bottom at great speed. Static lines started moving diagonally across the screen. The Bohemian wahoo cried it's war cry.
So basically, when you put a DVD in our DVD player, it's impossible to see what the hell is going on. It's impossible to read any of the words or see any of the pictures. Our DVD player is kaput. I am so discouraged that I can't even remember if the sound was working so we could at least listen to a movie.
2 comments:
I wonder if you took the dvd player to Ecuador if it'd work there. Anyway, as you started writing I kinda saw it coming. I remember when we were in England, I had borrowed a friends tape player (mine was too big) and bought one of those converters to plug it in. I plugged it in in my dorm room and wicked stinky smoke came rolling out of the machine. I jumped up really quickly and unplugged it, but too late. I literally and figuratively smoked it. It still played with batteries, my friend understood. These things happen.
My father in law has an old TV in his attic that is the type of TV that I apparently switched our DVD to be compatible with. We're going to disconnect our DVD player, take it up into his attic, plug everything together and cross our fingers. If that doesn't work, we'll pitch the thing into the trash and buy a new one.
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