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I think that $3 for a movie "rental" is way too expensive,

Finally, I realized that with the amount of money I was spending on the netflix subscription, I could just buy movies on the cheap and watch them whenever with no feeling that I was blowing the subscription (http://www.dvdpricesearch.com, AFAIK, is the best way to look for movies). Works for me, but I watch only one or two a month.

I do have friends, though, who can easily handle the max movies allowed by netflix, and still seem to have time to go to the 20-plex and sit through 5 movies in a single day.

Personally I find the general purpose comparison shopping sites like Pricegrabber and Froogle very poor at getting relevant results for most products. They are usually not able to differentiate different products and either group unrelated products together or don't group related products together. Luckily there are lots of sites where you can comparison shop for very specific products, like Compare Cartridges for printer ink cartridges, AddAll for books, DVD Price Search for movie, Cheap-Subscription for magazines, etc.

There's your problem -- you're buying from Amazon. According to DVD Price Search you can get the Farscape DVD for about $25 from DVD Pacific or Overstock. Still more expensive than the tape, but a reasonable markup for the special features.

But the real problem is that the Farscape DVDs are clusterfucks -- the MSRP for that set of five episodes is what I pay for an entire season of Buffy or Angel -- if Farscape were priced like that, the VHS sets would have to cost $8 to be a better buy.

Froogle's okay, but specialized sites like DVD Price Search are better since you can view multiple items at a time in a spread-sheet style.

What I do now is if a band I like has a DVD compilation of all their videos I'll just buy it off something like http://dvdpricesearch.com/ and if that's not available just go ahead and download it. I happen to get digital cable so there's multiple video channels (we used to get much music which I remember being pretty good but that's been pulled) and they all mostly play music videos. I don't really watch them though because they almost never play anything I like. Still better than MTV though.

-DG

Obviously special promotions will give you a better price than DDD's normal prices. Even Best Buy has some great DVD prices when they have their "3 DVDs for $20" or similar promotions going on.

As far as everyday prices go, though, DDD is usually the winner. When I use DVDPriceSearch.com to search for good DVD deals, DDD is almost always the cheapest.

DVD Price Search is the pricewatch equivalent for DVDs, but my personal favorite of the bunch is DeepDiscountDVD. It can take two weeks to receive your order, but the prices and selection are generally unbeatable. Free shipping.

Man, I remember the good ol' days in 1999, early-2000 when e-tailers were selling at a loss and hoping to make it up on volume. The best DVD deal I got was when one store decided to sell everything in their store at 55% off their regular (not MSRP) prices. Their server almost collapsed under the load, but I managed to fill my virtual cart full of stuff and so ended up getting the Criterion Collection version of "Brazil" for less than $15 :)

DVDPriceSearch.com is great for finding the best prices for DVDs.

Try DVD Price Search for DVD's. They also have an excellent coupons section.

Incidentally, I was surprised to read the fine print the other day, and notice that Enhanced CD is an RIAA trademark. So even when I was buying from what I thought was a smaller label or an indie band, the ECD logo on it definitely meant that money went to the RIAA for some certification process. Not that I will stop buying all such CDs, it's just good to be aware of it.

So as to not go completely offtopic, the Web Services idea is pretty great. I use .NET, and I don't anyone has yet linked to O'Reilly article describing how to use Amazon's WS here. I can't wait for other companies to start following suit - some of the more useful ones would have to be shipping (FedEx/UPS) and Web email providers with no POP3 access. As for shopping, I really wish DVD Price Search would start offering it, as I like to shop around before just buying something off of Amazon.

Try DVD price search. I've found all the best deals there, and they have a lot of obscure stuff. Many times it will be cheaper to order from Canada and pay shipping than to run down to the Best Buy. (Canada is also region 1, for those of you who haven't already hacked your player.)

Eighty-two bucks apiece from North American DVD.

See? All seven seasons. Knock yourself out, dude.

--grendel drago

I just ordered mine from Deep Discount DVD. I chose this site based on a search from DVD Price Search.

Brick and mortar stores have cheaper prices than online, eh?

• I guess that
• these sites have
• a lot to learn
• about that then ;-)

You can find most DVD's cheaper at dvdpricesearch.com. The Black Adder box set, for example, can be found for significantly less than what amazon offers it for.

You can find most DVD's cheaper at dvdpricesearch.com. The Black Adder box set, for example, can be found for significantly less than what amazon offers it for.

Its a good site for finding DVD's at the lowest price, and they include special offers and coupon deals from Amazon.com, Buy.com, BN.com and others.

There is a snandard for DVD. Just some cheap DVD players that came out around last Christmas didn't bother to support dual-layer DVD's.

Lots of DVDs are duel layer. I can tell because my player has a super breif, but supper irratating pause when refocusing. Movies I was buying last summer, and before were duel layer.

The Matrix has some other problem. Like use of alternate angle, or a diffrent path through the movie or something. I'm not quite sure, beause my player didn't have problems with it. I think it has problems with the "white rabbit tour" which is the normal movie, but some scenes show a white rabbit, and if you hit enter then you get a "making of" for that scene. I'm not quite sure what DVD features are used to do that.

Now all we need is the average street price of all DVD's to come down to compete with VHS movies. I've been supporting DVD since late 1998, and so far, only good things have happened. (Special editions of movies, lower prices, better quality, no more flipper movies, etc...)

I havn't bought VHS movies for a long time (well, ever, but my wife use to buy them a lot). I seem to remember them costing more then I pay for DVDs after a quick trip through a price search engine. Are video tapes really cheaper still?

DVD's are starting to wander up to about $30 for really well-known new releases (like the Sixth Sense), which I think is a bit high.

I think even $20 is a bit much. Between dvdpricesearch and mobshop, I usually pay about $15 for a DVD. I do realize though that we probably have to pay a bit more for good transfers and interesting extras! I've been wondering if directors and stars do commentaries for free (doubtful!), or if they have to be payed a lot to do a commentary track. Perhaps they gain an increased percentage of sales.