Customer Reviews

ClearPlay HD Upconvert DVD Player with 12-month Membership

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I have been a fan of Clearplay since they started. The earlier, non-HD players, had a few flaws, but worked well. There were problems with some of the movie filters which caused the player to hang up momentarily. The next generation of players seemed to have some serious technical problems, and at one point I thought about cancelling my membership. I decided to speak with their customer support group and decided to give their new HD player a try. I love it. The quality is there. They still have a problem with some of their movie filters, but I have not experienced any hardware issues. It looks like they got a handled on their players.

I absolutely love my ClearPlay DVD player. I have owned it for close to a year and never had a problem with it. I rent from Blockbuster, Redbox, etc., and I've never rented a movie for which a filter was not available.

I see that many people on Amazon are upset about ClearPlay's membership policies, and I agree that it is not made clear on their website that if you don't continue your membership, you can't continue to use the filters. This should definitely be clarified. The salesperson I spoke with when first purchasing my player made sure I understood that the filters could no longer be used once my membership expired. Although this means I have to keep my membership current, I understand their business model... how will they make money when people only purchase a 1 month membership, download all the filters they can, and then quit?

Occasionally ClearPlay has specials where you can extend your membership for a lower rate, so if you take advantage of the specials, you pay a lot less in the end.

For my family, it is totally worth the money to avoid the toxic content many movies contain.

I bought the player last summer and got the free membership with it. We used it to edit the movies but also use it as a regular player. After the first month was over, I received a call asking me to renew the membership. I couldn't at the time and told the representative that I already had all the filters I wanted. He then told me that I would have to pay an additional 20 dollars on top of the monthly fee to re-activate my account when I could. It seemed honest enough. Within a week of the 90 Day Warranty expiring, the player stopped working. I would insert a disc and it would spit it back out. I called customer service and they sent me some files to my e-mail to put on the filter stick to fix the problem. What they didn't tell me was that these files would delete my filters and not fix the problem. When I called them back they said they couldn't help me unless I paid them 70 dollars for a year of membership. I told them to forget it and decided to see if I could fix the problem myself. I opened up the player and didn't see anything wrong but it did start reading the discs again. About a month ago I got a monthly membership to get my filters back. Before the month was over I called them to cancel the membership. Now suddenly I couldn't use the player without the membership, which is not what I was told the first time. They made me get my filter stick and delete the files. They then accused me of not deleting the files because they didn't hear the "bing" through the phone. I told them I had a sleeping one year old in the house and had the computer speakers down low. They then accused me of downloading more filters while I was on the phone with them. I only went on their website to get the customer service number. I have since read all the information that came with the product and it doesn't say ANYTHING about needing a membership to use the player. It also didn't say anything about that on the advertising (T.V., Radio, Internet, etc.) for the product.

Additional information added September 1st: Canceled subscription on July 28th. Just checked bank account and more money was taken out on July 31st and August 31st. Called Clearplay and got an answering machine.

For the past several months, ClearPlay won't work with newer rental DVD's. Apparently, Netflix and Blockbuster have changed something to do with the catalog numbers of the rental DVD's, meaning that ClearPlay can't make the filters for them. If you are wanting to use this with rental DVD's, call ClearPlay first to find out if they've corrected this. But it does work pretty well with older or purchased DVD's.

UPDATE 1/23/10 - Talked with Clearplay tech support, and the situation regarding the above has apparently changed. Filters are now being created for new rental disk releases, and they are moving backwards through their catalogue of 3700 movies to revise the filters so that previous rental releases that didn't have filters will now have filters that work. Clearplay recommended going with Netflix over Blockbuster to reduce your problems with filters and rental disks.

UPDATE 10/22/2010 - This latest version of the Clearplay DVD player - 747 HD Upconvert - fixes all problems that I had with the previous 2 generations of Clearplay DVD players. This product simply works now, and I've updated my rating to 5 stars. Don't hesitate to get it if you want to filter out the filth from your movies. And yes, you have to pay a monthly or annual fee to have access to filters for new movies - if you don't want to do that, don't buy this player, or don't buy/rent new movies.

We purchased at clearplay player back in July, and returned it in August because we were very disappointed with it and felt it did not live up to the advertisements for it. We had it on the strictest settings, but did not see any difference between those settings and the more tolerant ones. On many occasions, the player left content in the movie that my husband and I found offensive. It was great at taking out language, but terrible at taking out scenes and inuendos. We were not pleased with this product and felt there should have been a difference between strict and tolerant settings as advertised.

I owned a Clearplay player that gave out on me. I wasn't surprised because I watch TONS of movies and love that I can watch them without the ickiness. This model is really good, but the actual loading of the movies/filters takes a lot more time than my previous player. Don't get me wrong, it's worth every penny you pay for it.
The actual filter does bother some people because it's not perfect by any means. It will skip mid-scene, without any sort of smooth transition. But, this is worth it to me.

This is my fourth ClearPlay machine. The first one I purchased a couple of years ago just stopped working altogether. So, I ordered this "new and improved" HDMI model. It didn't work. We sent it back. ClearPlay sent us a new one. Again, it didn't work. I sent it back. ClearPlay sent me another new one. Finally, this one worked. After over a month of dealing with horrible quality issues, moronic customer service reps, and ridiculous delays, we have an operational ClearPlay machine. I like the machine, mostly. I like the fact that I can rent rated "R" movies and clean up the language, etc. The editing features deserve a B to B+ grade. Not perfect, not horrible. If you buy one, be prepared to send it back at least once until you get one that works.

My family has used the ClearPlay DVD player for a couple of years now and we LOVE IT. We have played many DVD's rented from Blockbuster, Hastings, and RedBox without any problems. DVD's that have been purchased at stores like Target, Wal-Mart, or onlin here at Amazon also work fine. It is very important to my wife and I that we not feed our eyes, ears, and minds with gratuitous violence, sex scenes, and foul language (Romans 12:2).

Without ClearPlay we would not have been able to watch near as many movies that we would have liked because even PG-13 movies have very questionable content. We do not subscribe to cable TV/satellite and are busy most of the week so as to not notice. However, on weekends we enjoy having "family movie night" and have watched hundreds of movies because the ClearPlay DVD Player allowed us to. The list of movies available are current (e.g. "New Releases" at Blockbuster or Redbox can often be found on the list).

Sometimes it does take a little effort to know what's on the ClearPlay list when you visit the video store (or box), but that's easily achieved by printing out a current list and taking it with you (or visiting the web site of where you plan to get your DVD and having a list of movies you have already cross-referenced with the ClearPlay web site). If you do forget a list, a quick call home can help you get a movie on the ClearPlay list easily since ClearPlay's web site is searchable. You can also watch a lot of older movies on the list too (the ClearPlay list has thousands of titles!). If you previously avoided watching a lot of movies that had inappropriate content, you will be able to "catch up" on MANY of them and, thus, will find great joy renting cheaper, older movies that you can now finally watch without subjecting you and/or your family to "junk".

When you watch a movie with the Clearplay DVD player, you are barely aware that it is filtering out the inappropriate words and scenes. If you have ever watched an "edited for TV" version of a rated Pg-13 or R movie, you know how it essentially works. Most of the movie is still viewable, to include the main plot and, by far, most of the scenes. It seems that there are always those one or two scenes that are put in there and ruin the movie from a moral point of view. The editing is done so that it will seamlessly "cut away" from scenes deemed inappropriate.

On that subject, there are various categories (sex, language, violence, etc.) and then "editing levels" (1-5, as I recall) that you can set on your player so that you can "fine tune" the editing to your personal liking. Even just aggressively editing everything makes the movie still very watchable and most of it is left for viewing/listening. For example, the sound is briefly "silenced" at the places where a cuss word is used. Most of the time you barely notice, though occasionally you could perceive what was said because of the context of the sentence and if you can read lips. Overall it does an absolutely fantastic job.

The Bible tells us in 2 Timothy 3:1-4 that in the end times there will be a substantial and noticeable decay in the morals of society, and I believe that nowhere is it more reflected than in today's entertainment industry. The ClearPlay DVD Player, however, is a wonderful blessing to anyone that wants to enjoy movies without the filth. I highly recommend this product to anyone that cares about the movies they watch and yet wants to still be able to enjoy movies!


Jeffrey R. Camino, Author
Pray That You May Escape

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Awesome product for families and folk wishing to cut out scenes. Does not modify your discs.
You won't really notice the scenes getting skipped. Profanity and the use of God's name are just muted out.
VERY Granular in filtering out content. You can watch a blood and guts movie and filter out all the usages of God's name or any romance scenes. (or vise versa) Several filtering categories to choose from. New filters are available for a monthly subscription of about $9/month.

I unpacked the box, and had this hooked up to watch the first movie within an hour. The only issue with hookup was in modifying the video output to use the HDMI instead of the standard output that came with the ClearPlay. I found this issue talked about in the FAQ's, and resolved it quickly. I rented "Up In the Air", which is a romantic comedy, rated R to test it out. Two F bombs were missed by the filtering right at the beginning, but other than that, I was comfortable enough to put down the remote and relax for the remainder of the movie. I love the levels of filtering, and I suppose I should have lightened them up a little bit for the rated R movie. Some phrases were totally bleeped out which resulted in lost content, but I found it worth it to be able to skip over unwanted content. I think ClearPlay will work best for those PG-13 rated movies, like Benjamin Button. There wasn't much filtering needed, just a few curse words, and sex scenes. The sex scenes filtered out nicely, we see the couple embrace, maybe kiss, then it appears that the camera cuts away (just a little sooner leaving all of the details to the imagination). Overall, love the quality, and any compromise of lost content is worth it. The only other issue I had was with loading the easy updates (loads all available filters instead of one by one for each movie). Customer service quickly resolved this for me, they have a call back system, so I didn't have to wait on the line, and the english speaking representative walked me through re-formatting the usb filter stick. Within minutes, all of the available filters were loaded. I am recommending this to friends, waited a long time to be able to expand the selection of movies in our household. Great job!!