[wbassett]

As always, I enjoyed the podcast!

Sorry to hear about your A2 breaking on you Marshall, and as much as I sympathize and hear your pain I really think that was a fluke more than an indication of overall quality of the players. I have two now and no problems whatsoever and nobody that I know with an A2 has run into anything like that.

One thing I will mention is extended warranty! When I bought my $99 player at Best Buy the extended warranty was $9.99 and to me that was a no brainer. Based on what you are saying that shipping is $15, it sounds like it would have more than paid for itself. Now I can say I'm not sure what Best Buy would do, if they would fix the unit, give you a replacement, or a refund (in the form of a store gift card most likely, they're not to keen on giving actual money as refunds anymore...) but they would resolve the issue for you I'm sure. I suspect since they don't have any in stock to swap out a player with you, Best Buy would most likely ship it off for repair which would mean a couple weeks down time I'm sure, and to me that is pretty unacceptable... especially if the scenario is it is a primary HD player.

For those that bought at Walmart, I'm not sure Walmart has extended warranties, at least I have never heard of them offering one but maybe they started.
_____________________________________________
Content- I agree content is king and with that the reigning king is SDVD! Still, at around 480 HD DVD titles, and last I saw slightly (but not by a wide margin) more BD discs, that is a lot of movies. I remember you saying you don't have a huge in house collection so that is a lot of titles to chose from either format before running out of options! Of course that's nothing compared to SDVD and for people like me that tend to like older movies that aren't always out on High Def yet, that still brings us back to SDVD being the king of content.
_____________________________________________
Black Friday- Big disappointment to me and I agree, shop on-line and look for deals there for the Holidays. We didn't go out and wait in line mainly because there really wasn't any 'deals' that I was interested in. We went out around 1:00PM and in our area the parking lots were almost empty. We were able to get spots right up by the store at ToyrUs, Target, and Walmart. That's something that we never seem to be lucky on during a normal weekend or shopping day so I was very surprised.

I'm sure the price of gas (and heating oil) has a lot to do with it, but in my area at least it didn't look like shoppers turned out in droves, unless they all were out and back home by the time we went out.