kingtopher

I tried searching but "Ray" is too short and if I use "freezing" or "glitch" I get 500 results, so that's no good. I apologize if there is a thread for this already.

Anyway, I purchased the single disc version of Ray about a week ago at a Best Buy in Findlay, OH and took it home and about an hour and 50 minutes into it there were some major freezes and stuttering and pixellation. It wouldn't play forward from there and wouldn't rewind or fast forward through it either. The same problem happened during the credits after the movie. I took the disc back and got another copy and just got finished fast forwarding through the entire disc, on a different DVD player 900 miles away (I'm back at my place in Maine now) and there is a similar problem, only this time in a different spot (about 2 hours and 10 minutes into the movie). Exact same thing. When you watch it the image pixellates, freezes up, and eventually the DVD player stops the movie. These are different brands of DVD players and everything. Was this a problem that anyone else had? I can't be the player, for reasons I've mentioned before. I guess it is possible that a bad batch got sent to that Findlay store and that's why I got two. If I am correct about this, Best Buy here in Maine should exchange the disc that was bought in Ohio, so I will have to try that this weekend. I really like the movie but I'm getting sick of defective discs! I've never had this problem before, ever.

nemein

Well get him a jacket then


Seriously I netflix it and didn't have a problem on my Sony. Good luck...

petroc

I had a similar problem. I have a 5 disc Panasonic DVD player. It froze up around that same point, and I bought my "Ray" from Best Buy. I then tried my defective disc on my other RCA dvd player and it froze


I returned it and the replacement copy worked fine.
Hope that helps,
BD

Roper

I had the same problem. An entire chapter and the first few seconds of the following chapter were unplayable on three different players. I didn't want to go through repeated returns so I took a refund.

kingtopher

Hopefully it was just a bad batch at that store and the next one I get up here 900 miles away will be fine. I guess I shouldn't be all that surprised that the disc was made by Universal, should I? Seems like they're letting their subpar quality standards bleed into their mainstream releases now too.

Al Padrino

Well, it's not like the DVD didn't already have enough negatives going against it. Seriously, what should've been a deep DVD for a solid film centered around a powerful performance, was treated like a subpar catalog title.

ams

I had the same thing happen at the end of Shaun of the Dead....I watched the whole thing just to have it freeze and lock up at the bar scene at the end. I was pissed. I exchanged it for a new one.

Squirrel God

The guy is dead, so I don't really think it's fair to view his lack of animation as a problem.

kingtopher

I just got back from Best Buy with my third copy, and it appears to be fine. Interestingly enough, when I opened this copy, to my surprise, it was a two-disc set. Both copies I got in Ohio were double-sided discs. I wonder if this has anything to do with the problems. It seems that almost all the problems with freezing Universal discs have been double-sided sets, like the Abbott & Costello discs and the Monster Legacy sets. I'd be interested to know if petroc and Roper's copies were double-sided discs or the first disc of two-disc sets. Also I wonder why they would do this - is this a common thing for there to be both in different regions of the country?

D-Ball

It seems every dual-sided disc from Universal has problems (i.e. Abbott & Costello, Monster Legacy, etc). Hopefully Universal receives enough returns on these discs and completely does away with them. But I see the new Casino SE is planned as a dual sided disc, and I'm guessing some people will have problems with that as well.

JP5683

A friend of mine got the Ray single disc and he said it freezes at just under the hour mark.

But his brother tore up and threw out the receipt so he cant take it back.

rdclark

I just got around to watching my single-disc copy all the way through, even though I got it when it came out.

No problems watching the theatrical cut. After what I've read about the way the "extended" cut was handled, I don't know if I'll ever bother with it.

Great movie.

RichC

DVDMagic

We opted to watch the 'Directors Cut' of the movie with the extra 20mins and I have to say that the way that UNiversal have hendled this is very poor. The movie freezes slightly when the "extra" scene plays and the color fades and isn't in synch with the main movie. It is a very poor transfer to say the least.

mzupeman2

Yeah, this way it's much cheaper for them to just do a fade out and fade in to a scene that wasn't in the theatrical version... all they really have to do is throw the extra scenes on the DVD and then create a different playlist for the films entirety really. God forbid they actually edit it all together tastefully as a complete film, instead of breaking it up.