UPDATE: One week into February, and this deal is still working!

UPDATE: Still going strong on Feburary 16! Traderbora has plenty of movies for $5 and free shipping.

The most recent Amazon-associated merchant deal only lasted a short while before many of the movies stopped being eligible for free shipping. The prices were pretty good, but without free or discounted shipping, the cost-per-disc in the end was not always favorable.

A hot tip at the AVS forum says that at this very minute, and maybe at least for the rest of this day, there’s another Amazon merchant offering plenty of titles for $5.94 and the majority of them are eligible for Amazon’s discounted or free shipping promotions.

Go now and good luck!

• Traderbora Storefront at Amazon.com

UPDATE: It appears that the free shipping only applies to movies that are shipped out from Amazon. Movies sent out from this Amazon-affiliated dealer do not qualify for free shipping. I’m working on a list of the ones that do qualify, hang on…

UPDATE: This deal may be dead or lukewarm. As I went through the selection of movies, I found that many added to my cart last night were no longer being fulfilled through Amazon, and thus ineligible for the discounted shipping. In addition, many movies are now $4.97 and others have gone up by a few bucks. Try your luck with this deal by looking for the movies that indicate “2 new and used for…” and one of those 2 is likely to be done through Amazon, and thus eligible for free shipping. (thanks to ’sdscribe’ at the AVS forum for that hint)

Amazon.com offers numerous channels for retailing. They’ll sell many products themselves, and also partner with stores or resellers in some way, including handling the order fulfillment. It’s that latter case that brings us the most recent closeout sale on 140 HD DVD titles.

“Closeoutmovies Storefront” is a reseller using Amazon’s order fulfilment system, which means that Amazon ships directly from their own warehouses, and that you can still get some Amazon features like Amazon Prime, and Amazon’s free Super Saver shipping on orders that are $25 or more. At the $5.99 price, you’ll have to order four movies and some cheap $1.04 trinket to qualify for free shipping.

All of the movies are Universal Studios titles and selling for $5.99. The Battlestar Galactica and Heroes, Season One box sets are selling for $12.99. I checked over at Buy.com and DeepDiscount.com to see if this might be part of some general sale on Universal discs, but no luck. It appears that this is a closeout only from this particular seller on Amazon.

The other deals that people have been reporting both here and at the AVS forum threads have been great sales at Fry’s, and that Blockbuster is selling their used movies. In some cases, the Blockbuster movies are barely used, and in some other cases, the movies are arriving damaged. Longtime reader, Patrick, has been lucky with his Blockbuster orders as have many others. If you want to try them out, make sure to enter discount code holidaysurprise to save an additional 30%.

Some of you are going to mention that good old inetvideo.com has movies for $3.99 and $5.99, and those are good prices indeed. However, shipping on a $25 order is nearly $14, so it doesn’t work out to be the same great deal right now as this one through Amazon.

• 140 Universal discs for $5.99 via Amazon.com
• Blockbuster’s used movie sale with 30% off using code holidaysurprise

They said it best over at Engadget in describing Toshiba’s 2008 CES press conference as more of a funeral. It had been just a few days after Warner made a public announcement that they’d be going exclusive with Blu-ray, and the mood over at the HD DVD part of the show was definitely morose.

A whole year later in 2009, Toshiba has put on a much happier press conference full of some new HD related innovations, but with the notable absence of any Blu-ray support. Among Toshiba’s announcements were Regza HDTV models that can play movies stored on USB flash drives, or downloaded directly from the internet. The models also offer enhanced up-scaling of non-HD video, and a 240Hz effect for smoother motion.

Toshiba also presented upcoming technology using the Cell processor which could handle multiple HD sources simultaneously, for example a DVR serving different rooms with their own HD movies. The Cell was also driving a prototype 56-inch 4K x 2K resolution HDTV (which is double the current HDTV resoluton). The Cell processor was jointly developed by Toshiba, IBM and Sony, and Toshiba has been working with it since around the pre-HD DVD days on various multimedia applicatons. IBM has used the Cell on some servers, and Sony uses it as the brains for the PS3.

It’s been interesting to see what the other companies, many of which are already Blu-ray supporters, have been up to as well. While they are still pushing forward with Blu-ray technology, LG, Samsung, Panasonic, and even Sony seem to be embracing digital downloads too. All have announced HDTVs that connect to the internet for the purpose of viewing various kinds of content. LG has also been working on Blu-ray players that download movies.

Most of us in the USA have some form of high-speed internet at home, and even on our mobile phones when we are out and about. It’s an inevitability that we will receive more and more of our movies from some sort of online/on-demand source. It’s also inevitable that these movies will become more HD and eventually rival what we already had in HD DVD and can get now on Blu-ray. But when exactly will that happen? And will there be a physical format, like a 50-layer Blu-ray disc, that delivers the next level of HD resolution (like the aforementioned 4K x 2K)? Or will the next physical format be some kind of memory card like the recently announced SDXC?

In all this talk about the future, I was somewhat amused to hear that one of Panasonic’s new Blu-ray players is a combo unit that also plays VHS tapes. I’m sure they have a good reason for doing this, and I hope it’s better than, “because we can.” I hope it upscales those VHS tapes really, really, really well.