It's morning now, and I'm going back to cataloging. Separate the good merchandise from the bad, and return the bad to the store from which it originated. This is really teaching me a lesson when it comes to running out and indescriminately buying a bunch of movies without doing my "buyer beward" research first.

Store: Best Buy at Sheridan and 92nd.

• Title: Gloria Estefan: Live and Unwrapped.
  Company: Sony Music / Epic Records
  Price on Receipt: $11.99.
  Price Tag on Box: Unmarked.
  Status: Bad.
  Comments: ogle won't play it. mplayer won't play it. pile, in hopes an exchange can be sought. (If they refuse to give an exchange or refund, taking it up with the credit card company might be fun, even if it's just a stopid waste of time.)
• Title: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Special Collector's Edition.
  Company: Paramount (owned by Viacom / Blockbuster, last I checked)
  Price on Receipt: $9.99
  Price Tag on Box: $9.99
  Status: GOOD!
  Comments:
  Looks like we found real buried treasure here! Haven't watch the whole thing yet, but in ogle, the menu just comes up normally. In mplayer, running it with the simple command "mplayer /dev/dvd" brings up a nonstop stream of really wacky flashing colors, like they're some sort of crypted code waiting to be discovered embeddded in the frames. This one is definitely a keeper.
• Title: Collectible Classics 2-pack: A Tale of Two Cities + Great Expectations (cartoon animated). 2 boxes shrink wrapped together into one product.
  Company: "GoodTimes DVD"
  Price on Receipt: $5.99
  Price Tag on Box: $5.99 (on outer shrinkwrap)
  Status: good
  Comments:
  Both come up fine in ogle. That's good enough for me.
• Title: In Dreams (widescreen)
  Company: Dreamworks
  Price on Receipt: $5.99
  Price Tag on Box: $5.99
  Status: Good
  Comments:
  Works great in ogle. That's all I really wanted. Beautiful packaging and menus too. Dreamworks (started by Spielberg, Geffen, and who else?) is really starting to win me over. Even if they won't give my money back for the bad ones, the bargain I got on this treasure made the trip worthwhile.
  
• Title: The Matrix Revolutions. 2-disc widescreen edition
  Company: AOL Time Warner. Duh.
  Price on Receipt: $19.99
  Price Tag on Box: $19.99
  Status: disc1: good. disc2: good
  Comments:
  Awesome. Thank you Neo. My faith is being restored. (But I have a bad feeling about the next one...)
  
• Title: Millennium Season 1 (from Christ Carter, creator of the X-Files
  Company: FOX.
  Price on Receipt: $48.99
  Price Tag on Box: $48.99
  Status: disc1: works!. disc2: good. I'm happy. Not going to bother with checking the other four.
  Comments:
  Whew. I was really hoping to watch these again. Chris Carter and crew put SO much time and work into them, especially the first season. It would be a shame if they were to become lost due to bad pressings. (like the Harsh Realm set I tried last night. Every disc in Harsh realm had bad sectors. But we'll get to that later.)

Good. That wraps up my first obscenely impulsive splurge. (After Tax Total on Receipt, BTW: 111.23, charged to my VISA credit account.) Out of that batch, there was only ONE bad apple. That won't be so bad. I'll just circle the item on the receipt, take it up to the customer service counter, explain the problem, and see if they can do anything for me. If they can't, it's no biggie. Maybe it will still work in my other player. But I'm bummed if I have dvds that won't work AT ALL in my computer. Such is life.

Since I only ended up with only one bad item from that store, I'm going to make the sticky note pasted on the box even more helpful. I'll go so far as to write down the exact versions of ogle and mplayer that I used (both very recent from gentoo's official repository) when I attempted to play it. IF they take it back and send it back to the distributor, maybe that will help their quality assurance department sort out the problem.

Remembering: The bad disc came from the Sony Music corporation, and does not necessarily bear any reflection on the artist behind the microphone. However, I think somebody's quality assurance department might be in need of a little help.

GASP. I am utterly confounded when I attempt to play it this morning, and discover that, to my astonishment, NOW IT WORKS! Wow, sweet. Maybe it's just flaky media. Like those discs they've been talking about that intentionally corrode 24 hours after opening. Maybe there's some sort of "reverse corrosion" going on with this one.

Either way, I should probably rip it and make a backup just in case. But for now, I can rest. ALL of the DVDs I bought at Best Buy #1 yesterday are good. Now, I can rest. But that was only the first store.

Several still to go. Be back in a flash.