Didya went a little crazy/overboard like me? (1 Viewer)

have you splurged on buying HD media discs all of the sudden?

i watch content on HTPC. no consoles, only standalone is for DVD Audio+SACD primarily (since you can't play SACD on HTPC, otherwise, it'd've been HTPC-ONLY). i don't own any VHS and very few DVD's.

i was originally going to wait for the HD format war to be "settled" until 5-6months ago... i purchased XBox 360 USB HD DVD drive for around $165ish incl. tax and stuff (i had a $40 coupon) that included king kong HD DVD.

i also bought casablanca. i tried to play both discs on my HTPC with very little success. apparently VC-1 requires a lot of horse power. just a few months ago i upgraded my HTPC and could play a lot of HD DVD's and i also sold my XBox 360 HD DVD drive to upgrade to the LG GCC-H20L. thus, in the span of just the last 4 weeks, i went from 2 HD DVD's to:

Alexander Revisited: The Final Cut (epic)
Casablanca (classic)
Constantine (TrueHD)
Four Brothers (on sale)
King Kong (came with XBox360 HD DVD external drive)
Mission Impossible (classic)
Planet Earth (classic)
TMNT (TrueHD)
Star Wars
Troy: Director's Cut (TrueHD)

2001: A Space Odyssey (TrueHD)
A Clockwork Orange (TrueHD)
Battlestar Galactica: Season One (classic AND TrueHD)
Heroes S1 (awesome first season)
The Matrix Complete Trilogy (classic TrueHD)
Galapagos (Planet Earth, part 2)
The Shinning (classic TrueHD)
V for Vendetta (TrueHD)
What Dreams May Come (like a painting)
The 5th Element remastered
Final Fantasy The SPirit Within
Big Fish
POTC1&2
Memento
Casino Royale
Donnie Brasco
Pitch Black
Shaun of the Dead
Chronicles of Riddick
Usual Suspex
Speed
happy feet
300
ratatouille

I've definitely gone overboard with all the recent HDM sales lately. I've even bought some with the express purpose of watching and then reselling them. At the time I figured that the deals were so good I was bound to at least break even. Little did I know at the time that there would be BOGO sales till the cows came home. :frowning: Oh, well, at least I've learned my lesson, and I'm now back to only buying the 'essentials'.

I bought a bunch of HD DVDs last Christmas when it was easy to use the $10 off deal with Google Checkout, but I've slowed down during the year.

Oh man, can I relate to that.

I too was planning to sit out the war and ceased buying standard DVD's at the end of last year, ending with a fairly decent collection of 1116 titles.

However, after the Paramount/Dreamworks announcement and the release of the LG Blu-Ray/HD-DVD ROM drive I decided the time was right for me to jump in format neutral.

So I placed my first HDM order at the beginning of September, imported the ROM drive directly from Japan and also picked up a shiny new Denon 3808 AVR via a local group buy.

Since then I have been making up for lost time !! According to Movie Collector - including pre-orders up to the 8th of Jan, my current total of HDM titles is, errrrr, 193 ! Which also includes a lot more std DVD upgrades than I expected I would get...

I expected to only buy new titles but once I started, I bought about 15 titles the first day after I bought my new player.

War? What war?

Unfortunately; I can't seem to stay out of a good fight and so bought both

I must say; I don't comprende the thread title...words like 'crazy' and 'overboard' do not compute. Please define your terms of reference so I can make an accurate assessment as to whether I am either or; or both ....MWMWWHAHAHA

The only battle I seem to have is deciding which HD/BD title to watch next; or go to work....arghh

I don't know if buyer perception has changed in the last couple months, but in September when I sold off some discs, unopened, from the B2G1 sales in Agust, I was suprised how much I got for them. Getting very close, and in some cases more than the normal Amazon prices ($25 for Apocolypto for example).
I did over-buy HDMs in that sale, using the opportunity to grab anything I remotely liked or was interested in (do I really need to own Music & Lyrics?).

There is always that temptation with new technology to overbuy software to make sure you get all the value you can, as fast as you can, out of the hardware.

When my extra 10% discount from Amazon runs out Jan 1, my HDM buying is going to be severely curtailed to only absolute must haves. Casual impulse purchases will wait until B1G1 sales only...and even then the loss of that extra 10% is going to make me more discriminating.

Hell, just typing that last part out now, I think I justified to myself all those August pick ups. I'm gonna miss that extra 10% off :frowning:

Maybe Amazon will extend the discount again? It would be awesome.

Yeah I over bought too. But I think a lot of them are ones I considered on standard def but decided to hold out until HD.

yesh, i made my post a lot clearer. initially, i wasn't able to clear VC-1 titles very well until i upgraded my HTPC. then, i can play VC-1's very well and i ended up selling off the XB drive and upgrading to a combo drive... thereby eliminating the format issue. i literally just installed the drive last wednesday before turkey day and half of those blu-ray titles haven't arrived as of right now =P. i did went a little bit cracy with the BOGO. i was even thinking about the 4 pak blu-ray BOGO (12 for $120ish).

I didn't really partake in any of the BOGO sales. Problem for me was I already owned the titles I really wanted and while there were a lot of borderline titles that almost tempted me I managed to restrain myself in the end. I don't want to fall into the trap of buying something just because it's on HD/BD.

I also plan to cut back a bit on my blind-buys of new release titles. I contemplated buying The Invasion, Shoot em Up, Sunshine, Eastern Promises, Bourne, The Kingdom, etc but I'll just rent instead and if I like any enough to want to own, I'll pick it up when it's on sale.

If the studios want my money they'll have to release more classics, older cult movies and A-list catalog titles. Sorry but I'm not going to biting on drek like Anchorman, Old School, Van Wilder, Legend of Zorro, Hollowman, Timecop, Mobsters, White Noise, Seed of Chucky, Patch Adams, etc.

It's like deja-vu all over again from early DVD days. But back then the DVD deals were even better with all the dot-com coupons and sales trying to outdo one another. I got so many borderline DVDs then because they were the only things released and the deals were good.

I just got one of the $99 Wal-Mart A2 HD-DVD players and then bought 11 HD DVDs at the 20% DD sale to get me started. But I intend to be more discriminating with purchases now. I have to face the reality that I don't rewatch things as often as I should to justify purchases.

I am in the same boat. I jumped at everyone of the sales only to find out that I owned most of the titles already:frowning: . Should have waited a few months instead of buying the day of release and maybe I could have used the sales.

As far as restraint, with nearly 300 High Def titles in my collections, restraint is not something I have been able to maintain.

Star Wars?! Did I miss something or is there an HD bootleg I don't know about?

I've been thinking about upgrading my old HTPC to make it HDM compliant.
My main question is this - would it have the ability to decode Dolby TrueHD into multichannel PCM and then send it to my Onkyo 604 like my PS3 and HD-A2 does?

Oh yeah, I went overboard. Big time. I have 28 blu-ray titles, and I've owned my player for just over 3 weeks. Basically, I'm averaging 9 titles a week. It was over 2 months before I had nearly 30 DVDs back in the day. It took more than 4 months to accumulate 30 laserdiscs at the beginning.

made ya look. just wanted to see if people were actually reading these list things .

i do have HDTV captures in 1920x1080i for all 6 movies



as for comparing this against SD DVD's when it first debuted, i disagree. when SD DVD first came out, not titles were anamorphic and quality suffered. HDM don't suffer from the same fate and the masters are all clean. i really do NOT foresee studios spending a TON of $ remastering every single archive title just to spiff it up for HDM. EVEN if they do, it won't look TWICE as good. maybe 1-5% better @most if you start with a nice clean print. a few examples, speed and usual suspex that i got look excellent already. even if you go through the best restoration houses, the results will not yield you a night+day difference. even if you increased the amount of bonus content, i still wouldn't buy a double dip (although adding uncompressed soundtracks to original releases that didn't include any HD audio would make me buy the 2nd dip). this is a whole new world here cause what you buy now can be considered "permanent". we learned quite a lot from SD DVD mastering days that even if it's 5-10 years from now, the encoding process couldn't make these images look TWICE as good.

I actually do have all 6 Star Wars films in HD. They were recorded to my HD PVR off of HBO-HD. Granted, it's 1080i, not p, and there is quite a bit more compression due to bandwidth issues, but all 6 still blow away anything I have on DVD.

Last year, I projected to have 100 1 year later.

This week, the 200 mark was passed.

NEXT WEEK, the 250 mark will be reached, lol.

Don't even remind me! All the 50% effective sale really got my number! I filled in a lot of marginal titles in my collection

Unfortunately, UPS managed to deliver a big group to some guy in the next state. What a mess to get that straightened out. I doubt UPS will ever do the right thing on this. Fortunately, he seems to be a really nice guy and has offered to send them to me by USPS (I promised, in turn, to reimburse him.)

I really expect to put the brakes on my purchasing soon, especially if Amazon lets the 10% special end. No more of those $40 list price disks for me!

It's funny to see so many people saying that they're planning to slow down their HDM purchasing when sales already suck.

BTW, no offense intended as I plan on doing the same.