What's the very first DVD you ever owned? - whether by purchase, gift, trade, or any other form of acquisition. Please feel free to share any fond details or anecdotes about your foray into the realm of digital video.

The first film I ever purchased on DVD was Hannibal back in the early 2000s. This was the fullscreen release, because frankly my teenage self was oblivious to differences between aspect ratios. My household had always used bulky CRT television sets and computer monitors, so widescreen was a technology I had not yet been exposed to. To be honest, I'm not even sure if a widescreen release of the film was in fact available at the time. I seem to remember that those were sometimes held back so studios could release them in the form of (more expensive) special or collector's editions.

It was interesting, because my household didn't actually have a DVD player back then. I just noticed one day that the family computer had a DVD-ROM drive as opposed to a standard CD-ROM drive, so I deduced that our computer could probably playback DVDs. So I scrounged up a little spending money and bought my very first one. I believe those retailed for something like USD$20 back in the day.

Now imagine my frustration when I popped in the DVD and was informed that my system lacked the proper codecs to play it. After a few hours of tinkering, I found a freeware media player online that had the codecs built-in. And low and behold, I got to watch Hannibal in 4:3 aspect for the very first time.

Coincidentally, some of the earliest DVDs I got were the special editions of the TNG films in 2-disc format. I still have Generations and First Contact.

I never did care for TOS or any of its films, except Generations since that's more of a TNG affair.

Too lazy to search for my answer in one of the multiple older threads on this, but I imagine it was a free promo DVD from Best Buy. First real DVD was probably part of an 800.com three for $1 order. Owned dozens before I bought a DVD player.

Started buying them within months of launch - so it was definitely one of the early launch DVDs for me.

A buddy bought me the "The Rock" in 1998 for my birthday. I didn't actually get a DVD player until my birthday in 2003!

As a side note I still have that Toshiba SD1800 DVD player I received in 2003 which came with two free Warner Bros. DVDs - Eyes Wide Shut and Any Given Sunday. "The Rock" DVD has long since been replaced with a Blu-ray.

My brother gave me Scream on DVD as a Christmas present in 1998 as an incentive to get me to buy a player. It worked. Now I have more DVDs than I'll ever have time to watch.

Boogie Nights (original release, in a snapper case)

My first actual movie for DVD? Well back in Christmas 2001 or 2002 I got Sam Raimi's Spider-Man and Psycho II for DVDs for christmas. So both movies were and still are pretty much my first movies for DVD

Oh, that's easy. The first cassette, CD, VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray I ever bought - including those first three with "my own money" as a kid - was Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The first two were technically the album Monty Python Sings, but there's a Holy Grail song on it, so it counts.

That’s. Awesome.

Fight Club and Hal Hartley's The Book of Life. Still have both of them.

I think the first one for me was What Lies Beneath. A very good start I must say, considering how the transfer was good, all the animated menus and the extras...

Terminator 2

Unfortunately it was defective, where it froze 20 minutes into the movie. I went back to the store where I got a refund. (The retailer was out-of-stock of T2 dvds).

If I didn't have that bad experience with that defective Terminator 2 dvd as my first purchase, I might have dived head first hardcore into the dvd collecting hobby back in late 1997.

Around that same time period, I also encountered audio cds which had disc rot already. The really annoying part was that they were out-of-print titles released by small record labels which didn't exist anymore.

These two unfortunate bad experiences very much abruptly ended any possible "dvd collecting" hobby for me in those days. I only started buying a lot of dvds in 2011.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring - Extended edition.

A couple of years before that purchase I'd purchased a "screamer" computer system with a DVD drive (looked like game distribution might head that way) and 19" CRT (my main TV was a 27" set and the kid's TV was a 19"). The first few times I watched it was on the computer. It had composite video output but was impractically located to connect it to the TV. It was another year or two before I purchased a dedicated DVD player.

Pretty sure Ninja Scroll was the first disc I purchased when I got a DVD player.

Tomorrow Never Dies, silver case edition. Asked for it for Christmas before I even had a player.

Jackass: The movie. Bought it before I even had a DVD player (got a PS2 the next week).

The Devil's Advocate.

I actually bought it several months before I even got a DVD player because they were forced to re-edit the movie to remove the sculpture and I wanted the original version of the movie.

Pretty sure it was Legend: Ultimate Edition.

Pretty sure (at least according to my DVDProfiler) it was The Complete Superman Collection (ordered: 4/11/2001)
Which I got free at buy.com for buying a Dell with internal DVD-Rom.
I think I held the coupon for close to a year before finally deciding what to get. Either that or it took a year to be able to check out on dial-up...

First rental was Eyes Wide Shut.