For purposes of this thread, “obsolete” means that large number of new Hollywood releases have abandoned the standard DVD format and will never be released that way. The studios have completely moved on to just blue-ray or whatever else might be developed.
Basically, I have not yet made the lead to hi-def and I see little reason to do so until one of three things happen.
probably quite some time. Blu-ray adoption will probably remain slow, and there are just way too many DVD players out there in the field for the content mafia to ignore. I think the death of the DVD will hinge on broadband internet becoming ubiquitous and affordable for almost everyone, at which point online rental/streaming/on-demand services will take over. if you had to pin me down to a number, I’d say DVD’s still got about 10 years of viability left. I wouldn’t be surprised if Blu-ray is the last worthwhile physical format released.
Likely Blu-Ray players will continue to be made capable of playing DVD’s, since there is a vast library of DVD content out there that may not get re-issued on Blu-Ray for a long time.
It’s worth noting that VCR’s are still being sold, and movies are still being sold on VHS videocassettes, even though DVD’s have been mainstream for over a decade. And tapes are clunky things, and VCR’s are entirely separate devices from any Blu-Ray/DVD/CD player. If those are still being sold, then I’ll wager jz78817 is right: given the current ubiquity of DVD players, it’ll be at least ten years before new releases stop coming out on DVD.
Note that if your SDTV dies and you replace it with an HDTV, you can still use your standard-def DVD player with it. Image quality won’t be SD, but it’ll work. So you won’t truly need to buy a new player until your DVD player itself dies.
I hope it’s soon. As a matter of course anything I get from Blockbuster or Netflix gets ripped onto my computer and then the physical medium gets returned pronto. I can play the movies on my PC and watch them on the TV via HDMI cable. Know why I like this so much? Because frikkin disks SKIP and STICK and it drives me nuts to have to abandon a movie halfway through. That doesn’t happen when they’re played from a memory thingy.
I haven’t bought a VHS/DVD player for a long time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t start making them with a USB port so they can read directly from a PC or thumb drive.
I think that in the near future, they won’t be sold in bricks & mortars at all anymore. And that includes BlueRay discs. You’ll just either stream it or download it to a player.
Of course, I could be wrong. I once owned an 8-track (kaCHUNK!) player.
What will replace them is not another media format, it’s internet delivery. Now that I have an iPod, CDs seem like an awfully clumsy mess. I bet the same thing happens to video, and faster.
I don’t know about streaming. If ISPs start capping bandwidth, then I don’t see how streaming a full Bluray (some of which are over 40 GB) could be feasible. Comcast currently has a 250 GB monthly cap, so that’s not exactly a lot of full Blurays you could download. Even if we implement more efficient video compression I don’t think it’s possible to get a full 1080p 2-hour movie down to less than about 12 GB, at least not without sacrificing video quality. For streaming to become a feasible alternative to physical media, the ISPs need to guarantee uncapped bandwidth, or else have a high enough cap that it doesn’t matter, say 1 TB per month.
I recently bought a 46" SONY LED TV with 3D capability and tried a few of my DVDs with it.
Shock and horror. I have to stand about 7 yards away before the picture starts to look good and the poor quality VCR tape blurriness effect disappears.
Luckily I only have about 40 of the damn things, and none of them HD DVD - That format didn’t last long.
All in all, I’ve become a bit jaded about the whole recorded movie scene. You pour money into a format and still end up with pure crap at the end of the process.
I won’t bother again until it all becomes sensibly priced, dirt cheap and not obsessively over protected.
Just to add a little bit, with the TV purchase I also got a bonus PlayStation 3 plus 2 BluRay 3D movies - Alice and Bolt - so I have a watchable “mini collection”.
Alice is good in 3D but I haven’t bothered with Bolt.
And my kindle is making my book collection seem archaic. I don’t know what I’m going to do to fill in the space vacated by the various book/CD shelves around my home.
You’re assuming that internet bandwidth capability will remain constant for the foreseeable future, but I don’t think this is a reasonable assumption.
Just like RAM, CPU speed and storage capacity, bandwidth has no place to go but up. ISP’s may cap user bandwith allowances, but the caps will go higher and higher as available network bandwidth increases. 250 GB per month? Moore’s Law says that could double in 18 months, so three years from now you could expect to see 1-TB bandwith caps.
Wow! I don’t understand more than half a dozen words of this. Seriously. I have no idea in the world what you’re talking about. I guess when the time comes, I’ll be shit out of luck so far as watching movies at home ever again. Unless I had a grandchild to train me in the new ways.
The people who provide your internet connection has set an upper limit on how much you can download each month. As is, that limit won’t allow for watching more than 6-7 Blu-Ray movies per month. Watching movies in full quality, online, won’t become an alternative until that limit is removed or raised so much that it doesn’t matter. (Note that the actual limit will vary depending on who provides your internet, but all providers have one.)
I am in the minority I know, as I don’t have a computer at home, or an Ipod, playstation, TV, nothing.
I do have a flat-screen with a built-in DVD player to watch movies on.
This question concerned me greatly as I have a collection of old movies that I dearly love, and was hoping if my DVD player broke I could buy a new one.
You’ll always (and by always I mean for the next 20-30 years at least) be able to buy a device that will read those DVDs. It will probably be able to read other types of disks too, just like your DVD player can read CDs. Even today you can buy cassette players and VHS players. It’s just that if you want to buy the latest album or movie, you won’t be able to buy it in cassette or VHS format.
There are still going to be physical DVDs around for a long, long time. Even today there are plenty of people with VHS tapes, and they work perfectly fine, and you can find used movies in that format at thrift stores and flea markets and garage sales. And since DVDs are so much smaller, it’s a lot easier for people to collect a lot of them. So they won’t ever be obsolete in the sense that you should just throw them out. They’ll be obsolete in the sense that you don’t buy new stuff in that format.
8-tracks only existed as the premiere format for about 10 years and were only mass produced from 1964-1982 (niche production finally stopped in 1988).
DVDs debuted in 1997, so they’ve already passed 8-track’s total time as a premiere format and they’re only a few years out from passing it’s entire mass production life.
Well both DVDs and BluRay are already obsolete in terms of technology we already have HVD which is Holographic Versatile Disc.
Of course this has been talked about for years and never has come about really.
People don’t like format changes. Look at digital TV. It had to be forced on us. Most TV stations were operating digital signals long before 2009 but few tuned them in.
You can rip a movie on your computer but even that gets old. I still see people using container formats of AVI and old codecs when MKV an x.264 is a better quality. Of course something soon will replace MKV and x.264
If your ISP is cable or a VIOS/U-Verse type of thing, you next run into a conflict of interest. Cable and VIOS want you to watch THEIR videos on demand. They don’t want to allow you to download it from another source, legal or illegal.
So capping downloads is a real possiblity, or at least throttling speeds is.
Storage problems are growing less and less as I now see even 3tb hard drives in the $150 range. But hard drives can be unreliable so you have to back up and back up and back up.
VHF still will be around as long as their are old movies that have been released on VHF and never on a DVD format, at least not yet.
If I may offer a personal opinion on this: people don’t like format changes that require them to spend money they’d rather not spend either replacing or modifying perfectly serviceable equipment, particularly if it means gains in dimensions that many people only vaguely actually care about.
Unless I had a grandchild to train me in the new ways.