Of DVD Players and things

We made a sad discovery the other day. We had the time and inclination to watch the Lord of the Rings (extended version), when a good half-hour or so in, our DVD player decided it didn't like what it was seeing, and jumped ahead a good bit. Analysis of the disc, we couldn't see anything.

Aha! Says I, I'll test it out in my trusty HP laptop!

Into the laptop it went, and HP has this wonderful feature called Quickplay with these hyper-sensitive buttons for playing movies. By "wonderful" here, I really mean P.O.S. It's really annoying, as the mere settling of dust in the house is enough to set it off. Double-bonus? It plays WORSE than our DVD player. It could barely load the movie at all. What's even more peculiar, I opened the movie in Windows Media Player, and that did much better than Quickplay, but exactly the same as our DVD player (this is in the SAME DRIVE!!! Someone explain how THAT works?!?!). Shoot! (I says)

For kicks, we tried it in my wife's Mac, where the movie played flawlessly. WTF?!?! So, the lesson here is, not all DVD players/drives/etc. are created equal. Nor are the movie discs themselves.