My copy skips at 11:24, and Philip Seymour Hoffman says "necessary means" twice. The rest of the movie plays fine. Anyone else have this issue or did I just get a dud? I'll probably try to exchange it tomorrow.

Your copy may skip, but he is supposed to say "necessary means" twice. There is actually a fan gag theory about Brandt being a robot, and his bizarre repetition of "necessary means" is one piece of "evidence."

Man I hope you're joking, or else you're not a true Achiever.

You're out of your element.

I wish I'd done a quick search before ordering the Lebowski Blu-ray. This thing looks disgraceful compared to the HD-DVD. The detail is all gone. There's slight motion artifacts that appear to be caused by some type of 3D DNR and some of the colors are just plain wrong. People with small TVs (50" or less) may actually prefer the BD but on a large TV or projector, the over-zealous DNR picture destruction is fully exposed.

There are some scenes where the colors look a little less dull and are slightly more natural than the HDDVD but on the whole, this is a shockingly bad effort and really, the person that supervised this transfer should be fired.

It's almost seems like Universal still haven't got over the whole HD-DVD flop and are intentionally making bad Blu-rays.

Avoid (unless you *really* want the extras.)

No, consumers are just so stupid that studios feel the need to remove any "grain" or "dirty stuff" to make the picture as pretty as possible. Otherwise they are going to shit a brick that their shiny Blu-ray player plays "ugly" movies and not buy any more.

That's just asinine. They're not intentionally making a "bad" product. They're intentionally adding DNR because they believe (and I'm sure they've done research to verify this) it adds perceived value to a majority of consumers. Face it, the people on this board who are educated about the many facets of filmography make up a very small minority of the general populace who enjoys viewing movies in HD. All they want to see are smooth faces and no grain.

It's a shame that because of this, Blu-ray will never realize its full promise or potential.

What full promise or potential?

If Blu-ray wanted to reach it's full promise the studios should have:

Not reused the same crappy artwork from DVD counterparts
Brought back inserts and booklets
Added more extra features and always included all the features from the previous dvd
Always respected how the original film appeared

There is one company that actually did all those things.

Disney?

TLK

Hahaha. That's funny.