Day 4: The Saga of the DVD

This past week I bought myself a Blu-Ray player. I've been wanting to get one for a few years, but they've always been pretty expensive. For a little while, the cheapest way to get one was to get a Playstation 3 which could read Blu-Ray discs. On Black Friday of this year, I bought a new HDtv. Samsung, 32", 720p. The price was pretty cheap. And with prices this low, I finally caved in and bought myself the player.

The purchase was pretty uneventful. Unlike the time I bought my first DVD player...

I don't know what year it was, but DVDs were still relatively new. VHS was still the better seller. The prices had come down enough for the DVD players. There was one movie that I really wanted to watch on that format. It was Dark City and it was one of my absolute favorite movies. Still is. So one night I drove down to the local Target store. I didn't know much about brand names, so I bought an RCA model player after about twenty minutes of hemming and hawing about which model to get and if I really need a DVD player. I also purchased a copy of Dark City on DVD because I needed something to watch on my brand new player.

I brought it home with me and brought it into my bedroom. I opened the box and hooked it up to my tv which I had bought a couple months earlier for about $50 at WalMart. I turned it on but got nothing. I tried changing the channel on the tv to channel 3 because that's how all VCRs worked. Nothing. I tried every channel. I couldn't get anything. After translating the instruction manual into something resembling the English language, I discovered that the TV needed to have an AUX channel in order for the DVD player to work. My cheap-o TV that I got from WalMart didn't have one!

I was at an impasse. I couldn't watch movies on my new DVD player because my TV didn't have an AUX channel. I sighed and thought, Fine. I'll wait to get a new TV. My parents' TV was dying and its picture had a bright green tint. I made an offer to them; I would buy a new tv, and they would get my old one. They agreed. I decided to wait about a week to get a new TV.

Well, it never works that way with me. A few days later I had grown impatient and needed to watch something with my new DVD player. That night I drove down to south Nashua and went into Best Buy. After much deliberating I settled on a nice 18" Samsung TV. I brought it out to the car. Much to my dismay, I found out that I could not get it into my car, a 1986 Toyota Camry. No matter how much I twisted and turned the box, it would not go in. Back seat, front seat, trunk. It just was not happening.

Parked next to me was a lady with a minivan. Unbeknownst to me, she was watching my efforts and escalating frustrations. She came over and stated the obvious that I was never going to get the TV into the car. We discussed options for a little bit, and she offered to put the TV into her van and follow me home. It was risky, me letting her put my new TV in her van. She could drive off in the other direction, making me $130 stupider. But she was a good Samaritan and helped me out. She followed me home with my TV, even though it was ten minutes out of her way. I offered her some compensation but she declined.

Now my TV was home. I had to struggle to get it into my room because the box was so damn big. I tried to hook up my DVD player to the brand new TV. Imagine my ire when I discovered that I couldn't. The TV had a Mono Sound System. I needed a Stereo Sound System! The cord that connected the two devices had three prongs. The TV only had room for two. I chose the wrong TV!

Suffice it to say that I was extremely pissed off at this point. After letting loose with a stream of choice four-letter words, I was still determined to get it right. I checked the time. It was about 9:15pm. There might be time to return the TV and get a new one. But I didn't want to go through the fiasco with the too-small Camry again. Thankfully, I still had my old car. It was a 1985 Ford Mustang with a hatchback. I was sure that the TV would fit in back.

There was one problem. It was the dead of winter and I hadn't driven my old car for a while. It was parked to the side of the driveway, deeply embedded in the snowbank. And at that point, the snowbank had turned to mostly ice. I got out the shovel and started to chip away at the bank. Thankfully it was not solid ice, just snowflakes that had iced over. I was able to wiggle the car out after about fifteen to twenty minutes of shoveling, chopping and general mining. I was definitely impressed that the car started, especially after being in the freezing cold and not being driven in quite a while.

I packed up the tv and loaded it into the Mustang and drove back down to Best Buy. I got there about ten minutes before it closed. I returned the TV and went in search of a new one. At this point I knew what I needed. In order for the DVD player to work, the TV needed to have an AUX channel and a Stereo Sound System. I found a 19" Samsung TV that had those requirements, and it was $10 cheaper than the previous TV! Things seemed to be looking up for the first time.

I brought the TV home and pushed it into my room. I hooked it up to my DVD player. I changed the channel to AUX.

And I got nothing.

I couldn't explain it. I wasn't getting anything. I rechecked all my connections. Checked the plug. Nothing. Not a damn thing was happening. At that point, all the energy drained out of me. I had no more fight left. I couldn't go back to the store because everything was closed. There was no way I was going to watch Dark City. I hypothesized that the reason I could get any satisfactory results was due to compatibility. The DVD player was an RCA brand. The TV was from Samsung. I reached the final decision to just get the same brand name devices. But I was not going to go through the hassle of returning and buying a third TV. This time I would switch the DVD player.

A couple of nights later, I packed up the DVD player and loaded it into my car. Then I ventured out in the middle of a snowstorm. I drove back down to Target and returned the player. I bought a new one, a Samsung brand this time.

I brought it home, hooked it up to my Samsung TV and--Hallelujah!-- it worked! I sat back to enjoy Dark City on DVD for the first time!

Now whenever I buy a new device to watch movies and such, I make sure that the brand is Samsung. Not because I trust it over any other brand, but because I don't want to go through the hassle of dealing with any incompatibilities.