# How long before DVDs become obsolete? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [May 24, 2007, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349 "2007-05-24T14:51:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Renee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/renee/32/287_2.png) [@Renee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Renee)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/1 "2007-05-24T14:51:23Z")
I occasionally think about building a “home video library” but I think that pretty soon DVDs are going to be about like VHS…you can still play them but they’re going the way of the cassette tape. It seems like a bad time to invest. I also don’t think DVDs are all that practical…they scratch way too easily and I’m just not that good about taking proper care of them. So, how long before we’re completely digital? Or are we already and I just don’t know about it? ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 3:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/2 "2007-05-24T15:03:08Z")
DVDs _are_ completely digital. They’re just one way of storing the digital information. And they’re not going to be obsolete until something better comes along. [QUOTE=Renne] I also don’t think DVDs are all that practical…they scratch way too easily and I’m just not that good about taking proper care of them. [/QUOTE] So you want something more indestructable and idiot-proof? I suppose it could happen, but I don’t imagine manufacturers are particularly motived to develop something like that. ---
**Author:** ![awldune](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c77e96/32.png) [@awldune](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/awldune)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/3 "2007-05-24T15:06:41Z")
[QUOTE=Renee] So, how long before we’re completely digital? Or are we already and I just don’t know about it? [/QUOTE] We already are 🙂 IMO, DVDs have advantages over VHS that the next-generation formats don’t have over DVDs – no rewinding, smaller, menus/seeking, etc. I think DVDs won’t be obsolete until HDTV really takes off, and they might well survive until the generation after Blu-Ray/HD-DVD. I understand that these formats are just as vulnerable to scratching as DVDs are. ---
**Author:** ![Renee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/renee/32/287_2.png) [@Renee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Renee)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/4 "2007-05-24T15:13:03Z")
Okay, by “digital” I meant stored on a hard drive or something similarly less fragile than a DVD. I guess I used the term incorrectly. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 3:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/5 "2007-05-24T15:13:24Z")
Perhaps in the future instead of owning a bunch of DVDs, we’ll keep the movies we’ve purchased on a hard drive in or near the TV. Or Video On Demand services will expand to the point where virtually everything you want to watch will be available instantly. (Netflix is already thinking about this, and you can already download a small selection of movies from their site.) ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/6 "2007-05-24T15:17:01Z")
In one episoode of The Simpsons there’s a shot of a dump with VHS tapes in a heap and an empty space with “Reserved for DVDs” written there. DVDs are already in the process of being displaced by HD DVD and blu-ray. The discs themselves have a limited lifespan because of oxidation of the thin metal layer (although I suspect that better technology will keep even old DVDs readable for wuite a long time – if anyone puts any money into it). Writable DVDs, which depend upon dye changes, have a shorter lifetime. I suspect the entertainment companies aren’t at all unhappy about this implied obsolescence to their product. It’s in their economic interest to re-sell movies in a new format every decade or so, and not in their interests to help you build a permanent video library. ---
**Author:** ![DeadlyAccurate](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ac91a4/32.png) [@DeadlyAccurate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DeadlyAccurate)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/7 "2007-05-24T15:29:05Z")
[QUOTE=Dewey Finn] Perhaps in the future instead of owning a bunch of DVDs, we’ll keep the movies we’ve purchased on a hard drive in or near the TV. Or Video On Demand services will expand to the point where virtually everything you want to watch will be available instantly. (Netflix is already thinking about this, and you can already download a small selection of movies from their site.) [/QUOTE] We already keep all our episodes of Futurama and The Simpson, plus a large assortment of movies, on hard drives connected to a Modix (which turns the hard drive into a video playback device. It’s nicely organized and easy to access. But they occasionally get corrupt, either during the transfer or randomly, so we have to pull out the discs and recopy them. There would need to be a way to re-download corrupted files. ---
**Author:** ![Trunk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/87869e/32.png) [@Trunk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trunk)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/8 "2007-05-24T15:29:10Z")
I think that even in 10 years, DVDs might be yesterday’s technology. Including HD/DVD and Blu-Ray. We already have HD DVRs. So, the technology is there. The only things holding it back are what. . .capacity and copyright issues? I wouldn’t try accumulating DVDs at this point. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/9 "2007-05-24T15:31:08Z")
I have the first few seasons of The Simpsons on DVD. There’s a snarky note in the first season DVD set that you can complete the whole series in time to buy the whole thing in the next format. (And in fact I have some of the Simpsons compilations on VHS.) ---
**Author:** ![Subway\_Prophet](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecb155/32.png) [@Subway\_Prophet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Subway_Prophet)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/10 "2007-05-24T15:38:22Z")
DVDs can’t disappear soon enough in my opinion. On the whole, they exhibit some high-power suction in the hindquarters region. Too much gimmick, increasingly less movie. Unfortunately, since these annoying gimmicks are billed as “features”, and enough consumers buy into that, it’s just going to get worse with the next big thing. Reasons why DVDs suck ass: Menu system. Spoiler-laden graphics, sappy music and “clever” navigation. (And the 30-second audio/video loop - ugh.) Just show me the movie. I do not want to see all the big scenes out of context, thank you very much. With VHS, you pop in the tape and press play. You can fast-forward past the ads at the beginning, or if you’re smart you can just position the tape at the beginning of the movie ahead of time. Pausable deniability. DVDs forget where you are in the movie if you eject halfway through. Hell, some players forget where you are if you have it paused for longer than ten minutes. The editions keep coming. What’s the deal with “widescreen” and “normal”, or “theatrical” and “director’s cut” editions? I thought one of the selling points of DVD as a technology was to have it all on one disc and let the player decide at play-time. Region encoding and CSS. I can’t believe this is still legal. Creeping featuritis. My 5-year-old DVD player won’t play half of today’s DVDs, even though they are properly-licensed DVDs, and it’s a properly-licensed DVD player. Apparently the firmware is too old, can’t be upgraded, have to buy a new player. I’m sure the industry collectively and instantly smacked their forehead and regretted the oversight. Annoying pause at layer transition. In dual-layer discs, the movie pauses for a second while the player realizes it’s at the end of layer one. Many recent movies have conveniently-placed scene transitions to deal with this, but come on - haven’t they heard of buffering? My music CD player had this feature ten years ago. MPEG compression artifacts. These are the splotchy “oil painting” like patchs on the screen where the digitizing process has sacrificed visual clarity for increased storage space on the disc. It’s extremely annoying on large smooth images such as deep blue skies, and on some movies becomes very apparent when you rewind. If they spent a little more time up front with the compression work, before the master disc is pressed, they’d get much better image quality with nearly the same compression ratios. Do I have any reason to expect the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will be any better? _Perhaps_ in the quality of image and playback, but the gimmicks will, if anything, only get worse. ---
**Author:** ![BobLibDem](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/boblibdem/32/3149_2.png) [@BobLibDem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BobLibDem)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 3:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/11 "2007-05-24T15:46:29Z")
I think eventually it’s going to give way to something with no moving parts like a pen drive. But I bet that DVD players will be available for some time to come and we’re just a bit gunshy because we’ve seen LPs, 45s, 8 tracks, quadraphonic, DAT, reel to reel, beta, videodiscs, and VHS all become obsolete. ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 3:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/12 "2007-05-24T15:47:43Z")
Labs have been working on holographic, 3-D storage for a while. If/when that is perfected, we will migrate from a moving device like tape or disc to a sold state object. Don’t know how that will affect the longevity of data on that medium or when this is likely to happen. It may be eclipsed by on-demand storage in the same way the Internet took over CD data storage for much commercial distribution. ---
**Author:** ![Dewey\_Finn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dewey_finn/32/4222_2.png) [@Dewey\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dewey_Finn)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/13 "2007-05-24T15:48:07Z")
All of those are legitimate problems with DVDs. (I especially hate the menus on DVDs, when all I want to do is insert the disc and have the movie play.) Another is simply the inconvenience of having to shuffle discs and and out of the player. ---
**Author:** ![Wallenstein](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/b5a626/32.png) [@Wallenstein](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wallenstein)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 3:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/14 "2007-05-24T15:57:30Z")
We have cable on demand which has 500+ films and a similar number of TV shows available, and it’s growing every month. That’s the future - within 5 yrs we’ll be streaming HD-quality content on demand and there will be no need for DVDs. For mobile play it’ll either be iPod-style movie players, or removable solid-state memory. ---
**Author:** ![Giraffe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giraffe/32/129_2.png) [@Giraffe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giraffe)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 3:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/15 "2007-05-24T15:59:16Z")
[QUOTE=Musicat] Labs have been working on **holographic, 3-D storage** for a while. [/QUOTE] (emphasis added) What do you mean by this? ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/16 "2007-05-24T16:06:44Z")
[holographic data storage](http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/443/ashley.html) > [@](#): > > Using the same optical components but replacing the stationary block of media with a rotating disk results in performance characteristics similar to those of a disk drive, albeit with terabytes (10[sup]12[/sup] bytes) of capacity per platter… > [@](#): > > Will one of these scenarios with data stored in holograms materialize and become reality in the foreseeable future? In collaboration and competition with a large number of scientists from around the globe, we continue to study the technical feasibility of holographic storage and memory devices with parameters that are relevant for real-world applications. Whether this research will one day lead to products depends on the insights that we gain into these technical issues and how well holography can compete with established techniques in the marketplace. ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 4:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/17 "2007-05-24T16:13:28Z")
Since you asked, here’s more: > **[Log in to the site | benemoodle](https://benemoodle.com/)** > [@](#): > > Atomic Holographic optical image data storage bandwidth is 400,000 times faster than binary bit text processing bandwidths used in todays storage technology. Scroll down about halfway; there’s an interesting chart of storage capacities. ---
**Author:** ![Hampshire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hampshire/32/4887_2.png) [@Hampshire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hampshire)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/18 "2007-05-24T16:16:12Z")
[QUOTE=Subway Prophet] Pausable deniability. DVDs forget where you are in the movie if you eject halfway through. Hell, some players forget where you are if you have it paused for longer than ten minutes. [/QUOTE] My last 2 Sony units let you do this. You can eject a movie half way through, watch a dozen other dvds, put that dvd back in a month later and it resumes right where it left off. ---
**Author:** ![Subway\_Prophet](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecb155/32.png) [@Subway\_Prophet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Subway_Prophet)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 4:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/19 "2007-05-24T16:19:28Z")
[QUOTE=e-logic] We have cable on demand which has 500+ films and a similar number of TV shows available, and it’s growing every month. That’s the future - within 5 yrs we’ll be streaming HD-quality content on demand and there will be no need for DVDs. For mobile play it’ll either be iPod-style movie players, or removable solid-state memory. [/QUOTE] Slight nitpick: Cable on demand is only a suitable replacement for video _rentals_, and gives the content providers much more power over my entertainment choices than I feel they need. (Not that there’s much difference between market-inflating restrictions on choice, and market-inflating restrictions on playback method.) But I agree - solid state memory seems to be the wave of the future. The 4 GB limit of 32-bit architecture works surprisingly well with feature-length films using NTSC resolution and moderate compression. From a technology standpoint, it’s fairly trivial to achieve larger media size using multiple banks, and commercially-available 64-bit flash memory (16 _billion_ GB theoretical limit) is not too far off. ---
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [May 24, 2007, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349/20 "2007-05-24T16:21:45Z")
[QUOTE=Renee] Okay, by “digital” I meant stored on a hard drive or something similarly less fragile than a DVD. I guess I used the term incorrectly. 🙂 [/QUOTE] I’m not sure that IU’d call a hard drive “less fragile” than a DVD. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-long-before-dvds-become-obsolete/405349.md?page=2)