Labor Day Deals At Fry’s
by Pravin on August 29th, 2008 in shopping.
I dropped by my local Fry’s on the way home from work and saw a nice stack of new Xbox 360 HD DVD Add-On players for $39.99, and picked one up. Now that I have my backup HD DVD player, I can more realistically think about picking up some additional HD DVD titles, with all these crazy fire sale prices.
I brought home a $15 five-pack of old-school Kung Fu movies on DVD, and also got Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon on HD DVD. Sales associates were still marking down lots of titles to $6.99, $7.99 (like Transformers), and $8.99. I saw the BBC Planet Earth for $39.99, but it was that price when I dropped by a couple of weekends ago too.
Visiting the store can be a hit-and-miss proposition because you can only pick from whatever they’ve got on their shelves (and they may also have scattered these around the store at various endcaps and clearance bins). You can get a nice list of HD DVD sale prices over at their website.
You can order from the site instead of visiting a store, but the typical things to consider are that Frys.com does not have discounted shipping (like the free shipping at DeepDiscount.com), and you may also be paying sales tax on top since Fry’s has stores in so many states.
As I was saying earlier, the big deal for me was picking up a brand new Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on for $39.99 because it means I now have a backup player for my HD DVD discs. I’ll be able to watch on my 360, but I’m more interested in hooking it up to my PC.
Yes, the format is basically obsolete, but I’m still getting a lot of mileage out of my player as are many of you. Sure, I’ll eventually start getting discs for my PS3, but with these amazing HD DVD sales still going strong, it’s been easier and easier for me to put off the inevitable start of a collection of blue-colored boxes.
Here are some Fry’s ads from a few regions:
- Orange County Register Fry’s ads
- San Jose Mercury News Fry’s ads
- Dallas Morning News Fry’s ads
August 30th, 2008 at 9:28 am
I have a question about the Xbox HD DVD player. What’s the best way to route the audio to a non-HDMI 5.1 reciever?
August 30th, 2008 at 9:53 am
The 360 HD DVD add-on is a USB peripheral, and relies on the host system (PC or 360) to take care of the audio and video details. On a non-HDMI receiver, you’re likely to have an optical input that the 360 can be plugged into.
The thing to be aware of is that optical does not have enough bandwidth to support the full glory of the HD audio codecs - you can only get that from HDMI. I am new to having the 360 add-on and I’ll write again if I learn any additional information.
August 31st, 2008 at 12:18 am
Thanks for the news Pravin. Please do let us know about your findings and how you had your XBox HD DVD add-on to work with your PC. I also do own an XBox HD DVD add-on, brand new but never have any luck on making it work on my PC (WinXP Media Center 2005). I do not have an XBox 360 yet as I am still waiting on a good deal on the elite version for the price to go down to a reasonable figure. I bought the add-on as a backup player for my HD DVD collection as well but I’m curious to have it also functioning on my PC while I’m waiting on a good deal for an XBox elite.
August 31st, 2008 at 8:59 pm
I picked up an xbox 360 hd dvd drive over the weekend at fry’s. took forever to figure out to how to use on my pc, eventually had to buy windvd to get it to work. unfortunately, my pc (or gc) isn’t fast enough, so playback is a little choppy. wish there was a freeware option for hd dvd playback.
September 1st, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Who was narrating the 39.99 Planet earth Weaver or Attenborough?
September 1st, 2008 at 2:30 pm
The BBC version is done by Sir Richard
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:48 am
Check out new reductions at amazon.com, PE $39.99 and harry potter boxset $59.99, plus many other (mostly warner) titles, no direct link to sale I can find.
September 7th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Picked up Mission Impossible trilogy HD DVD set today at Frys for 22.00 and picked up Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift for 7.99
They have a bunch of others listed for 7.99 also.