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This past Christmas season, my brother gave my wife and I a gift that we weren’t sure we wanted. We had a couple good reasons:
- We have a DVD player in each computer, one for the television in the living room and one for travel.
- We were looking at getting a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) or something that would actually save television to disc to get away from VHS entirely.
But there it was, a ClearPlay DVD player. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the technology, ClearPlay has a staff that actually watched DVDs (I know, some of you are wondering where you can get that job) and they detail offensive content that they put into filters.
These filters are able to mute bad language, skip bad scenes, etc., but since it’s a person doing the original edit they can actually be intelligent about how the movie progresses and filter for content.
The thing is, there’s a fee for the filters. And we really weren’t looking into paying more for watching movies. We generally don’t watch anything that would need excessive filtering.
At the same time, my other brother had given us a anniversary gift, and we thought it would be neat to pick up an LCD television set. And so, we figured we’d keep the ClearPlay player as our second player.
After talking it over, we decided to go ahead and pay the early introductory price on the filter and we thought we were set. The only problem was that the player had never totally worked right, even without the filters engaged. It could be downright maddening since you would go to play a DVD and it would say there was no disk, and it would get stuck reading the disk. And then there were times where the machine was just too smart for its own good.
So, after way too long we decided to return it and see if we could get it exchanged. Fortunately we were two days before the cut off, and we got a gift card– but the store has discontinued selling it! And they won’t give me cash back!
So, here I am with a gift card, no DVD player, and checking out eBay or somewhere else to get a DVD player and wondering what I’ll buy with the gift card. I don’t fault ClearPlay– because my brother’s works fine and the technology seems fine. I think it’s a mechanical fault. So, I’m willing to give them another try– and you can too by clicking the affiliate link above.
