You are not alone ... I also had issues with the double sided DVDs which was really frustrating. I was so excited but then certain episodes (usually ones I liked, not ones like Kiss of the Sabre I happily could skip over) had problems freezing up, skipping and not loading. I will admit it made me frustrated such a great series wasn't getting the consideration other "lesser" series were getting.MaximRecoil wrote: ↑Sun Feb 06, 2022 8:36 pm Getting the entire series on DVDs that I'm happy with has been a real pain.
I've always wanted the whole series on video. We got a VCR for Christmas, 1988, when I was almost 14, and around that time the local CBS affiliate starting running them in syndication five days a week at 9 AM. Of course, I was at school, so I recorded it each day and watched when I got home from school. I wanted to save them all then but I didn't have money to keep buying tapes, so I had to use the same tape over and over.
Around that same I was in a video store in the mall and I saw a shelf that had every episode of Star Trek on VHS. It was the first time I'd ever seen or even heard of an entire TV series being released on home video (and indeed, Star Trek was the first TV series they did that for). I thought, if they can do it for Star Trek, why not MPI too? So I asked the guy at the counter about it, but he didn't know anything about it. I figured it was just a matter of time.
It was also around that time that "Don't Eat the Snow in Hawaii" showed up at my local video rental store and I thought that was the start of a complete series release. Of course, there was no internet as we know it today, and employees of video stores never knew anything, so I could only speculate.
Some 15 years later I found out on the internet about the first season being released on DVD (TV series being released on home video was commonplace by that point in time), so I jumped in my car and drove 20 miles to the nearest Walmart to buy it. When I got it home, the DVDs didn't work right, which was a huge disappointment. Most of the episodes either glitched or completely froze. I checked on the internet and found out that lots of people were having the same problem, so I went back to Walmart. They had a policy against issuing refunds for DVDs that had been opened; they would only exchange it for the same DVD(s). I told them that if they could bring out a TV and DVD player and prove to me that another copy off the shelf worked fine then I'd be more than happy with an exchange; otherwise I wanted a refund. They didn't want to do that so they went against their policy and gave me a refund.
After some more searching on the internet I discovered that the DVDs that Netflix was sending out were single-sided and didn't have the issues that the retail ones had, so I signed up and had them send me the whole series (as many at a time as they allowed, until I got them all), and I made 1:1 lossless copies of them, which I still have.
Over the years I bought a couple seasons (3 and 7) when I came across a good deal, and had no problems with those. Then I came across the complete series set that was released in 2013, and it was only around $50 new, so I jumped on that. All those discs worked perfectly, but they'd screwed me over in a different way, i.e., the bitrate was much lower than with the individual season releases, by about half, so there were visible compression artifacts (especially during high-motion scenes, like shots of the ocean with all the waves), as well as much of the film grain being lost. They did that to save money on discs of course.
Last night I found the complete series on eBay, used but like new, and in individual season form, for $50 so I bought it. They are the 2013 re-releases of the individual seasons (like the season 3 and 7 sets that I already have), so hopefully they don't have the same issues that the original mid-2000s releases had. So once those arrive I'll have two complete series sets, with one of them being garbage due to the low bitrate, plus I'll have an extra copy of seasons 3 and 7, plus an extra copy of season 1 in the form of those DVD-Rs I burned from the Netflix DVD rentals in 2004.
As for the HD versions (from streaming sites and Blu-ray), I don't need them. When it comes to theatrical movies, I consider DVDs to be long-since obsolete; I only want Blu-ray or equivalent (I watch them on a 1080p projector and a 100" screen), but for old TV shows, DVDs are what I want, because I only want to watch them on a standard-definition (15 kHz) CRT TV, the same as I did when they originally aired. True DVD quality is more than enough to max out the potential of a 15 kHz CRT. If I had the Blu-rays they would just get reduced to 480i anyway, which is what DVDs are to begin with (because that's what the Blu-ray player that's connected to my CRT is set to output over YPbPr, because 240p / 480i is the highest frequency that a 15 kHz CRT can sync to).
Finally Santa gifted me a region free blu-ray player and the blu-ray set from England about 10 years ago (I think). They weren't the HD quality I see now on RokuTV, but they all played and the def was better overall.
To this day I still don't understand how such an iconic show isn't getting better treatment. My only guess is that since it's in such high syndication they don't feel there's that extra demand for the show since most people can see it almost whenever they want anyway.