Do you care about Blu-Ray vs whatever the other standard is? I don't. I doubt I will ever own a Blu-gay thingy. I never want to see another DVD player ever again. I am a serious convert to the idea of using hard disk to store everything.
Yes, I know, there are problems with relying on disk. They fail. From time to time. Like once in a zillion years. (Touch wood).
But DVD has an even bigger problem - the amount of time it takes from wanting to watch something to being able to actually watch it.
Consider this. I pulled out a DVD for the monkey to watch this morning. A Wiggles movie. To start with, it takes the DVD player about 20 seconds to wake up. Then I press the "open" button, and it whirrs and clunks for another minute while it decides whether to spit out the DVD tray or not. Sometimes it clatters away for a minute, then refuses to do anything. I hit the button again and am rewarded by a tray holding the last DVD we were watching.
Take that out, find the case for it, put new DVD in, close the tray. More whirring and clunking. Sometimes the tray comes out again. Eventually, the player recognises there is a DVD in there, and it proceeds to reading it.
After 30 seconds of reading it, up comes a stack of copyright information in 27 languages, and then an ABC logo, and then another ABC logo, and finally we get to the menu. Except it takes 10 seconds for the menu to load.
Hooray! I can start the DVD!
Whoops, it is not the one the Monkey wanted to watch. Monkey is having a tantrum and smashing up his Thomas train set. So Itry to go through the whole process as rapidly as possible in order to put in the Wiggles movie he wants to watch before the floor is covered in train splinters. Five minutes later, and one destroyed train carriage, he is happily lying on the floor in front of his movie. Lying in a cloud of train splinters. He's lucky he is not lying in a pile of smashed up DVD parts.
The alternative is to fire up PVR, which admitadly takes a while as it boots the OS, hit the menu button, select the movie, and it is playing 1 second later. Don't like that movie? Hit the menu button, select another and it is playing 1 second later.
When the DVD came out, it wiped the floor with the competition because the competition was the even more clunky video tape. The worst thing about video tapes is that the last person to watch it invariably didn't bother to rewind it, so you sat there for 5 minutes whilst the tape rewound. DVD was a great leap forward.
But that is not enough to protect it from an even more convenient technology. Know how many CD's I have listened to this year?
Zero. The whole lot have been ripped, and I hope to never load another CD again, except to rip it. I simply have to buy enough hard disk capacity to hold the DVDs that we watch regularly.
It can't be that long before bandwidth (video on demand) kills the DVD.
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