Paying more to save money

I received an e-mail from Amazon.com a week or so ago telling me that Wrestlemania 25 was available for pre-order for just $19.98, which for a 3-disc DVD set, is quite the deal. Of course, that's $19.98 American, but these days that's still only about $22 Canadian, so it's still a good deal.

I checked Amazon.ca, and it was an even better deal, as the Canadian price on the DVD was a shade under $33. I was saving $11, even factoring in currency conversions.

So, I placed my order through Amazon.com ... and lo and behold, the $11 spread vanished in shipping charges. Suddenly, my $20 DVD was nearly $31 US, which after currency conversion, became more expensive than the highly-marked up Canadian version.

In the end, I pre-ordered the DVD through Amazon.ca, because after adding a book I was planning to buy anyway, I got free shipping.

Wacky.

WWE: What is so hard about 16x9 DVDs?

I don't understand this.

The WWE has been broadcasting their events in high definition for nearly a year now. But their DVDs are still formatted in the standard 4x3 aspect ratio. I bought the No Mercy DVD this month, and was quite disappointed to learn that it was not presented in 16x9 widescreen.

And this isn't like the weird Wrestlemania DVD issue, either, with the DVD deciding (depending on your TV) whether to show the event in widescreen or not. (See this post and comments.) As far as I can determine, No Mercy has no widescreen option. It's formatted in 4x3. But it's framed in 16x9. Which makes for some very poor viewing of some of the action when both wrestlers disappear off the screen because they're in the portion of the 16x9 framing that gets chopped to make it 4x3.

This is ridiculous. Every Hollywood movie I own on DVD is in widescreen. Even UFC has put out regular DVDs formatted in widescreen.

So, WWE, what's your excuse?

EDIT 11:27 a.m.: OK, I need to clarify here after doing some experimenting. This is just like the Wrestlemania DVD. No Mercy will play in widescreen if you watch it on a widescreen monitor. I just tried it in my 17-inch widescreen laptop, and I get the little WWEHD logo and everything in perfect 16x9. Which, to me, is even more stupid. I can watch all kinds of widescreen DVD content on my 4x3 TV, but the WWE is compelling me to watch its DVDs in 4x3 on a 4x3 TV, effectively requiring me to upgrade my television to a widescreen, which I'm not going to do just to watch their DVDs. (Particularly considering that I don't have an HD converter box, and no HD capable TVs.)

So let me rephrase my question to the WWE: What's your excuse for not putting out the DVDs in native 16x9 format like every Hollywood movie release has been doing for years?

New WWE DVD: The Definitive Braden Walker

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Wrestlemania 24 DVD aspect ratio weirdness

Here's a strange one:

I bought the Wrestlemania 24 DVD. It's in 16x9 widescreen. When I play it on my 17-inch widescreen computer monitor, it plays in 16x9 widescreen. When I play it on my portable widescreen DVD player, it plays in 16x9 widescreen.

But when I put it in either one of the DVD players I have hooked up to our 4x3 resolution televisions, it does NOT play in 16x9 widescreen. Instead, it plays in perfectly cropped 4x3 standard TV aspect ratio.

Now, I have a lot of widescreen movies in my DVD collection. All of them play in 16x9 widescreen format with the black bars on my regular 4x3 TVs.

But not Wrestlemania 24. And I've fiddled with the TV/DVD settings on the DVD players to get it to play in 16x9, and it won't.

It's almost like the DVD auto-senses what the aspect ratio of the screen is and adjusts the DVD accordingly.

Is anyone else having this problem?

So I bought a DVR today ...

After having had the opportunity to work with a DVR in my professional life, I decided that it was time to ditch the VCR and buy a DVR at home. So one of our TVs now has a Digital Video Recorder attached to it - with a 250 gig hard drive and Super-Multi DVD player/recorder. The timeshift and chase play features were the big selling points for me, and I'm sure I'm going to get many hours of use out of it.

Pride Fighting Championships returns to DVD

This is the best news I've read all day.

Admittedly, it is only 8:25 a.m.

Seriously, though, my brother Dean has been getting me old Pride FC sets for Christmas for a few years now, and they're great. I'm looking forward to the "new" stuff coming out.