Remember how I just bought a new DVD player because my old one wasn’t playing movies? Now that I think about it, the movies it was having trouble with were Casino Royale and Stranger Than Fiction. The symptoms were basically the same as a bad disc - you put the disc in, the player tries and tries to read it to no avail, and you end up ejecting the disc.

From Slashdot…

“It seems that the most recent DVDs released by Sony — specifically Stranger Than Fiction, Casino Royale, and The Pursuit of Happyness — have some kind of ‘feature’ that makes them unplayable on many DVD players. This doesn’t appear to be covered by the major media yet, but this link to a discussion over at Amazon gives a flavor of the problems people are experiencing. A blogger called Sony and was told the problem is with the new copy protection scheme, and they do not intend to fix it. Sony says it’s up to the manufacturers to update their hardware.”

Did I just buy a new DVD player because Sony screwed me?

At least I didn’t buy a new Sony DVD player. It’s a Samsung. :)