Digital media like DVDs have a number of advantages over VHS when it comes to staving off obsolescence. If they’re treated and stored properly, they won’t deteriorate with time, no matter how many times the movie is played. So as long as you’ve still got a working player, you’ll never be forced to upgrade or go without. And HD-DVD/Blu-Ray players (and probably whatever comes after that, as long as it’s still some form of shiny disc) are going to be backwards-compatible with regular DVDs for the foreseeable future. Worst case scenario, if DVD-compatible players are hard to come by someday, but you’ve still got a bunch of old DVDs laying around, it will be trivial to copy all of the content onto your 100-terabyte keychain USB drive and beam them wirelessly to your eyeglass-computer. 
DVDs may stop being sold once HD-DVD and Blu-Ray take off (and eventually consolidate into one format – or all hardware becomes capable of playing both), but because the formats are so similar, the hardware will still be able to play them. The only advantage HD and BR have is storage capacity. Streamed, on-demand video is a possibility, but I doubt it will ever supplant physical media. No one wants to put trust in the integrity of the hardware to keep their software safe indefinitely. While physical media may eventually wear out anyway due either to oxydation or scratching, it isn’t reliant upon the hardware you play it on.
It won’t be until something markedly better comes along that does for current technology what DVD did for VHS that there will be a significant shift in technological standards that has any chance of completely obsoleting the stuff we have now to the point where it won’t play on future hardware. I can’t frankly imagine what kind of improvements can be done to boost the technology to such a level – other than holographic video or some other such fiction-cum-truth. Reliability and longevity is always an issue, but at current standards it sort of goes against the film industry’s financial best interests to spend much time pursuing that particular goal. They want stuff to wear out. It’s repeat business for them, and as long as isn’t wearing out in an unreasonable length of time, they don’t have any motivation to bother trying.
I like them, I buy them used, for my favorites, and go to the library for the rest. I hate paying for rentals and I hate the idea of paying for any cable/TIVO/On-Demand service.
I hope they stick around awhile.
“Less movie”? What DVDs have you gotten that did not include the entire theatrical release? Are you going around thinking that the name of the sled was “Rose”? 
I hardly ever look at special features. I’m pretty much just in it for the movie. I have no problem with DVDs, and have rented an average of 10 discs a month from Netflix since 2002.
It takes all of a minute to press the “menu” button when the disc starts playing (to skip the previews) and then select the “play movie” option. Even with discs that won’t let you “menu” out of the previews, it only takes a few seconds to fast-forward through them. You don’t have to watch the 30-second loop, you know.
As someone else mentioned, some players are quite capable of this. So it’s not a problem with the media, it’s a problem with your player.
So what? Weren’t you just complaining about all of the extras and features? Buy the version of the movie that you want, and ignore what else gets released.
Widescreen preserves the theatrical aspect ratio (the alternate is “fullscreen,” not “normal”), and results in black bars across the top and bottom of the TV. The theatrical release is what was seen in theatres. The director’s cut includes scenes that were omitted from the theatrical cut (for various reasons), but that the director feels add something to the film.
I have never heard this, and I’ve been around since the dawn of DVDs. But some/many special edition DVDs do include both the theatrical release and the director’s cut on the same disc (or in the same set). How could you expect the player to know which version you want to watch?
A point that I agree with (FWIW).
I don’t know what your DVD player’s problem is, but this certainly isn’t a universal problem with DVDs: I have a player the same age (if not a little older) in my bedroom, one of the cheap ones that was practically free after rebate, and it still plays whatever I get from Netflix. Because it’s a cheap machine it hiccups a lot more than the newer, better player that I have in the living room, but it plays whatever I want it to play.
I’ve never noticed this.
I’ve never noticed this.
Fascinating. Thanks for the links!
*Pssst…*Misnomer, I think Subway Prophet means “the person controlling the buttons” when he/she says “the player”, not “the machine blinking 12:00 at you”. See how that makes more sense?
RE: pause at layer transition
I’ve never noticed this, either, but how can we tell when the laser switches from one layer to another? If there was a 1 second pause that was carefully timed to not interfere with sound, and occurred at some point without warning, would we notice it?
RE: MPEG compression artifacts
At least some of these are due to flaws in the disc surface from whatever cause, and the reading software is making the best of a bad data set. There are many layers of interpretation and error correction, and one of the last-ditch efforts to make a poor read into something marginally useful is to create a picture that, while less than perfect, is better than a blank screen. You may have seen something similar in live sporting events where the transmission is flawed for a second and the picture becomes a little jerky and pixelated. Only the tragically hip may notice.
And who says a HD is less fragile. My CDs and DVDs don’t have a scratch, but my poor, much traveled, occasionally pulled out by some idjit who never heard or patience pen drives and external HD have been known to get the burps. Several of my “camera” cards can be used as pen drives but not as camera cards any more.
I don’t let Middlebro touch my CDs and DVDs, having seen how he handles his. He’ll be in his construction site, hands not just “dirty” but dirt-filled, and grab them like they were plates shudder.
Dollar stores around here still sell blank VHS and sound tapes, which means people are still buying them.
Several things in Subway Prophet’s post made little sense to me, and he/she had used “the player” elsewhere to refer to the machine playing the disc, not the person watching the disc. I stand by my interpretation.
On a lot of standalone DVD players, you can press STOP-STOP-PLAY and it will start at the beginning of the main movie.
Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are having a lot of issues with AACS copy protection and other things. For example, Pirates of the Caribbean on Blu-Ray may require a firmware update on some players to function correctly. Also, DVD players are available now with upscaling via HDMI cable to near-HD resolution. Also, there’s no format war with DVD (it’s a standard that all manufacturers agree upon) like there is with HD DVD and Blu-Ray. For those reasons, I think DVDs will be commonplace for a long time.
@Renee - If you’re burning any DVDs for your home video library, you might want to burn to double layer DVD instead of shrinking them down to single layer. I started doing that recently so that when I do switch to an upconverting DVD player and an HD display, I’ll have better source material to upconvert.
I have DVDs from 1997 that are still working just fine. Has anyone here experienced any oxidation problem?
Yes, but the Apple TV device stores only fifty hours of movies. What happens when you purchase more than that?
Burn them to DVD?
I dunno, I haven’t really looked into the Apple TV too deeply because even if it were the Coolest Thing Ever it (like pretty much everything beyond basic living expenses) is out of my price range.
Oh com’on, you’re stacking the deck by naming just the technologies that have gone obsolete. What about all the ones that are still around? Like DVDs, and . . . um . . . uh . . . crap. Well, you left out 78s from the obsolete list . . .
Get a TiVo and buy your movies from the Amazon Unbox. The way it looked when I purchased a few things, Amazon remembers what you’ve purchased and as long as it’s on their servers, you can download it as many times as you want (to the authorized TiVo box, of course). So you can theoretically buy a movie, download it, watch it, delete it, then come back months later and decide to watch it again, download it (without having to pay again), watch it, delete it, repeat as desired. Have hundreds of hours of movies at your command without having to store them on your local device.
I never have, on any DVDs or CDs. And I donn’t know anybody who has. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen in the fuiture. Here’s a relevant Straight Dope column: Do CDs have a life expectancy of 10 years?
I’ve heard that they’ve already got the next generation that holds some silly crazy amount of memory, too. Something like holding everything in the Library of Congress in a disc.
…as long as Amazon Unbox exists. I give it a 15% chance of still being around in five years, and a 1% chance in ten years, which is why I will not pay $14.00 or so (more than the price of the DVD in many cases) to buy from them. I have rented a couple (which is also too expensive, but not enormously so), but their selection of movies available for rental is tiny compared to those you “buy” (but don’t get anything physical when you buy).
Let’s face it: all of the current download-to-computer services stink. They’re riddled with “copy protection” that prevents you from backing it up or playing it on any but a very small set of devices (how do you watch an Unbox video at a friend’s house, or on your iPod?). These services are hideously consumer-unfriendly, much worse than what they’re replacing. They’re the “toe-in-the-water” to find out what consumers will tolerate and what the hackers and pirates can break. These are the services in which the lessons will be learned that make the REAL download services of the next decade possible. None of the current ones are going to survive.
That made me LOL out loud. (Fortunately, I also lost the first five minutes of Dark City, which ended up improving the movie immensely. Just kidding.)
I actually meant when you compare the runtime of the movie to the accumulated runtime of all the extra crap on the disc, you’re getting less movie and more unsatisfying filler.
Yes, but it’s like 2 or 3 more buttons I need to press to get past the non-movie crap at the beginning. And at least one of my DVD players (the Apex, I believe) won’t let you do this on some discs.
Between current and old hardware and my in-laws’, there are 5 DVD players in the house, of varying ages and price tag. (This sampling does not include DVD players on the comptuers.) Not a single one has this feature. I’ve expressed this problem with friends when watching movies at their homes, and no one I know has a player with an intelligent pause feature.
So while I accept that some players are designed to fix this problem, I don’t think it’s really widespread. It certainly is not universal.
Like how can the player figure out that I want to play the movie? There are buttons.
But addressing the multiple editions problem:
Widescreen vs. normal: Way back in, what, around 1998 or 1999, and DVDs are starting to make a big splash. One of the big revolutionary features of DVD video is alternate camera angles. There was a lot of talk about this feature being used to apply pan-and-scan on the fly to widescreen video, thereby providing both widescreen and normal aspect ratio using the same video data. I think I’ve only seen one DVD that offered alternate camera angles, and it wasn’t very good. (The Matrix, IIRC.)
Theatrical vs. director’s cut: Another big selling feature of DVD video was a branching system, where preselected scenes could be included or omitted based on the viewer’s preference. I’ve only seen this in one DVD as well. (The Abyss, IIRC)
My Apex and a little Panasonic I have have this problem. It normally manifests itself around the layer change, but on some movies with special playback features (like the afore-mentioned Matrix and Abyss) the player will crap out and require a pwer reset to recover. Both players were bought back in the 1999-2001 timeframe. The Panasonic is SOL. The Apex can have its firmware upgraded by a 3rd party.
Well, good. It’s still there. I’m not going to go back and re-watch my video collection to pick out the worst offenders, but it happens a lot. My wife noticed it first, pointed it out to me, and now I can’t ignore it even if the scene change is positioned around it. We’ve pointed it to friends while watching movies, and they see it too. We’re not the only ones noticing this.
The worst offender I can remember off the top of my head was Apollo 13, with the rocket’s night-time glamour shots on the launchpad. Titanic was also bad with this, as was at least one of the older Star Trek films.
New technology is going to come along every few years or so regardless. Whether that technology takes off or not will depend on a number of factors. Digital CDs and DVDs displaced analog tapes and VHS because it was far superior in many ways - didn’t degrade with each play, less fragile, better options for skipping through content. There were serious advantages to changing format, even if you had already built up a sizable library of tapes.
For DVDs to become obsolete will require a similar revolutionary change (instead of an evolutionary one). People are aready heavily invested in DVDs. Maybe once HDTV becomes the standard, enough new people will buy HD-DVD or Blu-Ray players to make that the new standard.
The problem is reaching a critical mass of consumers so your format doesn’t go the way of the old Laser Disks or BETA. It’s a chicken and egg problem. I’m not going to buy a new format until I see that format in every Blockbuster store. And you won’t see it in Blockbuster unless enough people have players for that format.
IMHO HD-DVD and Blu-Ray are transitional formats and we won’t see something that replaces DVD for a few more years.