DVD/HD question

[samintx]

Will all DVD movies be HD at some point? Will our external burners have to be replaced or just firmware updated? I don't care a hoot and a howler about HD but curious if computer user are going to be forced into it.

[Chupa Chupa]

At some point yes. In the near future no.

As for firmware allowing you to view HD DVDs, no. You will need a whole new mech. The lasers are different. But by the time we have a winner in the HD wars internal HD drives will be as cheap as regular DVD drives are today. It won't be an issue.

[mikebw]

HD-DVD and Blu-Ray use different lasers than regular DVD or CDs, so firmware updates are not possible.

I think regular DVD will be around for at least as long as VHS was following the release of DVD in the home theater market.

As far as the computer market goes, some people said DVD would threaten to supplant CD-ROM as the media of choice for retail programs but now we can see that most DVD discs are used for high-capacity backups, not retail software.
So, as it goes, people get larger and larger hard drives and need to find ways to effectively backup that data onto removeable media. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will fit the bill there, but I don't think you will be 'forced' to upgrade any time soon.

No doubt major manufacturers will begin to offer this next generation of optical drives as options or even standards in new computers, but seeing as how floppy drives are still around in some PCs I think CD/DVD-ROM drives will have their place for a while yet.

[Jem]

As long as the "form-factor" is the same I don't think CD or DVDs will go away, since it is so easy and cheap to keep backward compatibility a "feature" in the new HD/DVD drives.

Now if HD/DVD goes to a smaller physical size, or we move to non spinning holographic storage media, then yes, CD and all other spinning disks will eventually become obsolete, much as the vinyl LP did when they went from a physical stylus to an optical laser beam for reading the "data" from the discs.

And I for one believe spinning media WILL become obsolete before long (10 years or less) because spinning is such a BAD way to read data if there is a cheap way to do it with no moving parts (think flash media). Spinning was a necessity at the time it was developed, but I think its days are numbered. Just my 2 ¢.