I was wondering how long will it be before regular dvd will be phased out?

Question

What do u think the time table is until i have to update all my dvr players to blu-ray?

Answer 1

To 2 beagles and everyone else, you do NOT have to go buy a new machine any time soon.  Blu Ray is intended as an alternative to DVD for people who are interested in high end HD movies.  There is no plan at this time to "phase out" DVD's and it will be a looooong time before DVD's completely go away.  In order to get the most out of Blu Ray you have to own a 720p or preferably a 1080p HDTV and until most everyone has one of those DVD is here to stay.

Another note is that Netflix is adding Blu Ray instead of HD DVD, but will still continue carrying regular DVD's as well.

weeder

Answer 2

A long time.  A VERY long time.

And it is not for sure that Blu-Ray will prevail over HD.  I know that several companies have dropped HD and gone to Blu, but the battle is still on.

If you purchase a HD player, I'd get one that plays both HD and Blu-ray disks.  They will also up-convert your standard DVD's to near-High Def.

Myself, I will wait until a High Def player also can record to a High Def format DVD-recordable.  Until then, standard DVD's and and up-convert DVD player is just fine by me.

Answer 3

You know, I was just going to ask the same thing.  I have two DVD players and am going to have to buy at least one new machine.  I'm not happy about it.  We didn't buy the machines that long ago and now we're going to have to buy another machine.  I also belong to Netflix and I just read where they are also switching, so I have no idea when that's going to start.  I think the quality of the current DVDs are just fine and I don't really care to spend the extra money just because companies decide they want to switch to a different machine.  Sorry I don't have an answer, I'm just venting.  Have a nice day.

Answer 4

It will probably be quite a while. Current DVDs look very good now, and with an upsampling DVD player, they look even better on an HD set. I'd personally wait a while for the price of BlueRay to come down unless you have money burning a hole in your pocket.

Also, the news out today (Feb 19) is that Toshiba is halting production of HD-DVD players, so it's official that BlueRay has won the format wars.

Answer 5

It'll be at least a decade, if not longer.

First, until you get a HDTV, blu-ray is worthless to you.  While you CAN connect a blu-ray player to a regular TV, it won't look any better than a normal DVD in a normal DVD player.  It's going to be at least another decade before the vast majority of people have upgraded to HDTV.

Second, even if you have HDTV, a decent upscaling DVD player (this is a regular DVD player that can stretch the video from DVD up to the resolutions of a HDTV) may be "good enough" for most people.  After all, to watch blu-ray movies, you'll have to buy a new player, and new movies.

Third, by the time the vast majority of the market has switched to HDTV and blu-ray, there's a very good chance we'll see yet ANOTHER new technology or media format.  Some likely suspects include:

* 3D TV

* Solid state storage (essentially, thumbdrives for movies)

* Holographic storage (fit terabytes on a 1" cubic piece of plastic)

* Super HD/Very High Resolution TV - imagine a display with 6x the resolution of today's 1080p screens.

All of these technologies exist in labs today.  It wouldn't be too far-fetched to see them on store shelves within the next 10-20 years.