Home > Consumer Reviews > ClearPlay DVD Player with Free Trial Membership

I just ordered my third Clearplay capable DVD player, having the model I bought at Target less than a year ago fail on me. My initial player also went bad after about 18 months, and we're pretty infrequent viewers of movies on DVD. So I'm not real thrilled with the quality of the hardware, as others have mentioned. No longer having any choice of hardware manufacturers kind of limits the options - I wish they had a higher quality (maybe even with upscaling converter) player available - I'd be willing to pay more.

The fact that I put up with their unreliable hardware speaks volumes for my satisfaction with the Clearplay filters. Clearplay has made a much wider range of movies viewable and/or more enjoyable to me and my family, and the ability to specify levels of filtering for various categories of objectionable material has made it much more flexible. They also release new filters for just about everything very promptly. I just wish there was a way for them to apply the technology to digital movie files, since I doubt DVD's are going to be around forever.

My wife purchased the clear play DVD player with the thoughts of controlling the movie content for our children. That was in October and now in January, the machine still doesn't work in the filter mode. I have had numerous calls to their technical support. They sent me a new USB filter stick, but that didn't fix it. They promised to send me a new DVD player in December, but never did. I hope another company sees the potential in this market and makes a quality DVD player and filter system that works.

I'm grateful to my brother for turning me on to this great bit of technology. While maybe not the greatest DVD player in the world, that's not why you buy it. You buy it so that your family can watch movies without worrying about all that "questionable" stuff you usually find. Plus, you can vary the filter levels from only skipping one or 2 things, up to filtering every little thing. Or play the whole movie without the filters. If you have kids (or old-fashioned grandparents) this is a great idea. Love it.

I've had ClearPlay for about 2 years now. What other reviewers say is true, both the good and bad. The filtering works better than you think it will, with a few exceptions. Sometimes an entire scene is cut for just a few bad words, when they could just be muted (however this is an uncommon phenomenon). The other thing that bothers me is that mild words like cr@p and he|l are in the same category as stronger words like sh|t, so if you want the stronger ones filtered out, you also get the sound muted every time someone says he|l (ie, Gettysburg, etc). But this is the only way to watch movies without having to put up with the offensive stuff Hollywood feels it needs to include, so I can deal with the imperfections. Yes, the hardware is cheap, but this product is aimed at a pretty narrow market, so they have to control costs/price or they wouldn't be able to sell anything. The bright side is that I have had excellent experience with their customer support. It wasn't until after I'd gone through several free replacements that I discovered that my sound system's subwoofer magnet was interfering with the player. After moving the subwoofer, I had no further problems. But they were great about sending free replacements all that time I thought the problem was intrinsic to the player. The newest (black) model has really awful menus (looks like something from the old Atari 2600 console from the 80s), but luckily I still have the prior model (silver), that looks much more modern. Anyway, we still have a really high quality upconverting player for our clean movies, but this one is great to have on the side for watching the not so clean ones. It doesn't filter TV shows on DVD, but filters are available for just about every movie on DVD, and new ones are available within hours of the DVD's release. Membership fee is very reasonable.

My husband and I loved the idea of this filtering and my husband especially was exited to catch up on all of the movies we didn't see but otherwise would have if certain things were filtered out. We recieved the player and set up and downloading of filters was easy enough, but three months later, the hardware itself just wouldn't turn on. (and we only used it about once a week with me working full time and him in grad school) We contacted clearplay and they told us they'd send us a new one. Three weeks later, we called them up and they had no record of us calling and apologized and told us again they'd send us a new one...(long story short), it wasn't until three months later that we recieved our new one. And within two months, IT broke!! I was ready to give up and demand our money back, but my husband, still anxious to catch up on a few more movies, wanted to try once more. Well, this is our third clearplay DVD player and we've only had it for three months working, and same story- it just WON'T turn on!! I wish there was a company that would compete with Clearplays concept that made better hardware. The actual make of the DVD player is HORRIBLE and their customer service isn't much better. I don't know what they'll say this third time we call them now demanding a full refund. This is ridiculous! Don't buy this product unless you are willing to go through a hassle!