I gave a Toshiba HD A3 to my parents for Christmas. I hooked it up, Christmas Eve. Watched "Christmas Vacation" on HD, no problems. The next day, my parents watched "300" and they just called me to tell me that the thing froze/pixelated a couple of times, and they had to FF to get through it. They said it also happened on a standard DVD disc.

So, whats the final word on a problem like this? I've tried to search the issue online, get all sorts of theories, from "Well, it is what it is, you're screwed" to "it's the firmware (which I updated without incident to the latest ver prior to giving it to them)", to "defective hardware - return it".

Microfibre cloth. Use it to clean the disc.

The discs are brand new, out of the shrink-wrap.

Doesn't mean that they are completely fingerprint or scratch free. Look for the "Finickly HD-DVD discs" thread, more information there for the same problem.

I was going to say firmware, but it would appear that's not the issue. So, outside of that, and if the discs were flawless, I'd say it's a bad machine and I'd send it back.

A disc can look flawless and still be bad too. HD DVD needs to get these problems resolved, and now. This business of freezing, and updates after every release will not fly with the standard consumer.

I have already given up on my A3. It can play most of the discs I bought fine. However, it is just frustrating with rental discs. I will purchase/rent Blu primarily until a trouble-free next gen HD-DVD player can be bought for less than $250 MSRP.

I hope that's not a sign for things to come for me. I rarely have problems with a rental Netflix disc on my Xbox 360 HD-DVD player.

I don't have any problem with my A3 and rental HD-DVDs from Blockbuster Online. Neither do my parents with their A3 or a friend who has an A30. If you've given up on yours, then send it in for warranty service. Don't assume the whole line is fubared because your player is finicky. If all of Toshiba's players acted like that across the board, I doubt there'd be much of a 'war' at this point.

Eh? At which point did I make a generalization about Toshiba's whole line? I am purple and have no hatred towards HD-DVD or Toshiba. A lot of people have been having this problem with finicky discs, just see the number of threads about freezes here and at AVS.

I had problems with the A1 but have never had a problem with the A3.

Is it the 300 combo? Combos are the only ones to give me issues.

I have played dozens of Netflix HD DVDs and I have never had an issue. Now Transformers? THAT was an ordeal. I truly feel for people who have issues regularly because I was seeing red the night I was trying to watch that. A firmware update helped, but it was still very frustrating.

My toshiba A3 has been perfect on everything but one noticebly scratched netflix rental. I never did any firmware updates.

So far so good for me and my A3. Rented a couple of discs from Hollywood Video last weekend and they worked fine. I own both 300 and Transformers and both played with no problems.

I haven't done the firmware update but I did try and I have a question. I downloaded the update and burned it on a CD as an .iso file as instructed. When I put the CD in the A3 it said it wouldn't read a CD. What gives?

You need to download the file, and direct your CD burning software to burn in .iso mode. Simply burning the file to the disc does not work. .iso is an image of the original CD.

Thanks QGJ, but I'm thinking that's what I did. What I burned onto the disc was HD-A3-1300U.iso. Doesn't that mean its in .iso mode? I'm not great with computers at all so it's entirely possible that I'm missing something here.

There should be a "burn an image" option or something like that in your burner software.