... Too late. Its all gone! WhooosH!!!!

....



or *did* he???

Tried a separate thread, no results, gonna give it one more shot.

We got the entire Harry Potter collection for Christmas. On Blu-Ray.

Not one machine in our house will run a Blu-Ray disc; even the player built into our tv reminded us every time we stuck a disc in 'Blu-Ray is not supported'. We both suck at video games and so the newest gaming machine (only one, I think) in the house is a PS2. The DVD player we bought when the one built into the tv crapped out will not recognize a Blu-Ray disc; we tried with a disc that we got in a DVD comes with the Blu-Ray set. The Harry Potter set is still in its shrinkwrap, but for some reason Amazon has refused to accept it as a trade-in.

The thing is we really, really want this collection, but on DVD. If anyone's willing to swap, great! If anyone's willing to swap but would like something else thrown in from our side to sweeten the deal, we can talk. Hell, if anyone will give me a decent price on a full DVD set (used is FINE if the discs all work!!!) we can attempt to buy, though trading is our first choice since we're a fixed-income household (the reason we never bought the DVD set ourselves).

I'm putting this post on email notify, and I try to check my email at least 3 times a week.

You do realize BluRay is a completely different kind of technology, and will not play in anything that is not expressly designed to play BluRay discs? Requires a different operating system, and a different laser/reader thingy, as compared to a standard old dvd.

BluRay players are cheaper and cheaper these days.

yes, she does. Her point was she doesn't have one. any iirc from the previous thread, has no interest in getting one.

Grav, part of the problem is in fact the differing tech and cross-incompatibility.

Giving it a quick casual Google search shows me that even a not-quite-bottom-of-the-line Blu-Ray player goes for at least 10% of my ENTIRE monthly (fixed) income, and that's before the nearly 50% of my monthly income that goes straight to rent and utilities. And there's no guarantee it would be compatible with any of our other machines, including the only TV we own (the one with the dead built-in DVD player). My sweetie is also on a fixed income not much larger than mine and is by nature so non-materialistic that gift shopping for him is now "And what website would you like a gift card for this time?" because there's not much physical stuff he wants.

Getting a new DVD player was easy and under $50. Getting it hooked up and functioning took two and a half hours, three technicians' opinions, and a set of photos from a demonstration by the one of those three techs who actually understood what I was asking. If the built-in player in the TV was not Blu-Ray compatible, it's possible none of the wiring in that particular TV is.

PS3 was suggested on the other thread but appears to be even more expensive than a dedicated Blu-Ray player, and with my hands getting arthritic and my sweetie's increasing difficulty coping with things like on-the-spot decision making, concentration, and his own response to frustration, video games are pretty well right out so it's not like a PS3 would get used for its original purpose. And so I shall continue to hope that someday someone gets the set on DVD but wanted it on Blu-Ray and remembers me sniveling about the formats!

I'm not a contributing member on ANY other forum anywhere any more. I don't use Ebay because of PayPal--I tried to do my Christmas shopping using that combo as I had for several years, but a few years back I tried to log in on PP only to get an email stating that until I sent them a scan of my driver's license, ORIGINAL Social Security card, AND a utility bill with my name and addy on it, I could not transfer funds from my PP-verified decade-old bank account (only one I've had since 2004, still ticking along just fine) into my online PP account. They did NOT offer any guarantee of who would see or have access to the information they demanded, and so I left my PP account sitting with like $2 in it. There aren't many online retailers I trust, particularly when it comes to electronics that I understand poorly at best. So my Internet footprint is pretty tiny--Hell, my Twitter account is basically to keep updated on musicians' tour schedules and only has 2 non-famous people on it out of like 13 I follow total. My options for swapping out this set are pretty limited. I'm actually contemplating checking with the local pawnshop...if I can find a day when I won't ask the owner's wife if her brother is still in jail for identity theft and credit fraud because that could get...awkward.

Maybe you could create a gofundme page to buy yourselves the regular set, noting that the original set will be donated to your local children's hospital or similar?

I will keep the "crowdfunding" option in mind!

As for donation, I'm not sure there's a children's hospital in this state. My county has one and only one hospital, and as far as I know the college city up the road 50 miles or so has two to serve its entire county.

At this point I'm sorely tempted to ask at the next gem club meeting if any of the fossils even know what Blu-Ray is (I'd guess...knowing our fossils...maybe a third) or whether any of the youngers have a player.

The worst part is this was a Christmas gift from my sweetie's mother, who knows he loves HP (she bought him several of the hardbacks over the years too) but forgot we're fixed-income technological troglodytes. They went almost 20 years without even speaking, so complaining to her about a gift seems like just a bad idea, ya know?

We're also already looking at major electronics replacement costs this year.

My desktop tower (which was a gift) was refurbished when I got it, and that'll be 4 years ago in July. It's still working well, but I doubt when I finally have zero functionality in XP that it'll take well to updating the OS. Apparently desktop tower CPUs are almost extinct in the wild, so I may have to try to find a laptop that will run a terabyte external drive!

My terabyte external drive, where my writings and an archive of over 150,000 digital photos are stored, is like 6 years old now. I need to buy a new one and have the local shop clone over all the info, because my machine probably wouldn't like having 2 huge externals plugged in, considering if I forget and leave the current external hooked up, my tower (which has an 80-gig hard drive) locks up very early in the startup process. This requires a power-strip hard restart, so I try very hard to avoid it. Regardless, my external hard drive is getting quite old. It was $160 when I bought it to replace the $120 one that broke down like a month after I bought that. I'm hoping prices are WAY down.

My sweetie's desktop tower is like 6 or 7 years old and starting to give him trouble. Weirdly, the TEN-YEAR-OLD f*kking printer works just great for him! He bought the computer new and it was more than a month's rent on our apartment. He's also looking to go laptop due to the scarcity online of people selling reliable desktops.

My neighbor's the worst--he's gotta replace a Mac laptop that's older than our acquaintance (I've known him since late 2008 or so) with a warped battery (again) and body case. That will also mean an expensive new OS and security program update. And he HATES everything Microsoft or compatible with a vivid and profanity-riddled passion, so there's no talking him back to a cheap little Dell laptop or some such.

I can't do much for the menfolk, and since I may already be staring down an SSI audit, trying to (illegally--I'm on SSI) save up money would be very poorly timed.

It look like a flat screen monitor. It is the entire desktop inside that screen. Desktop towers were long ago replaced by what is also called All-In-One. A very functional system goes for as little as $350 - from computer companies with better integrity. Its CD-rom may even be Blu-ray.

All-in-One options suck as if any part breaks, the whole thing needs to be repaired/replaced.

Mom&Popdigr gave $29 for their BluRay player, and it has wi-fi. It hooked up with one wire, ok, two if you count the electrical plug. Took all of thirty seconds.

It was statements like this

that made (and make) me think she does not understand the situation as well as she (or us) might.

And I hereby admit that I may not understand the problem, hell, I'm not even sure there is a problem, so, I'm out.

Carry on.

I don't understand the problem either, but blu-ray players are $40 with free shipping on ebay.

If you have a 30 year old tv though, hooking it up might be a pain. And the cables may not be included.