Our 5 year old DVD player started refusing to power off. It also wouldn't eject some discs without a lot of coaxing. We trashed it and bought a $30 Coby unit from the grocery store. However, it skips a lot. We watched X-Men 3 last night, which we bought new and have only watched perhaps twice before, and the DVD player paused incessantly while it was in the forest scenes. I put the same disc in Amber's MacBook and it played the same scenes without any issues. I see this same problem occur again and again with different discs.
I checked out the DVD players on Consumer Reports, but they don't seem to test for "won't crap out pretty quick and die on you." I am only interested in 480i playback and really don't want to spend much on a DVD player, but I would like one that works as advertised. Unfortunately, I don't know of any way of accomplishing that except for spending more than I should and hoping for the best.
Any thoughts?