I understand why people were excited about DVDs.  VHS was low quality, it degraded quickly, and was too easily damaged.  Most of my VHS tapes where grainey, had lines or lost vertical sync when they were only a few years old.  Most of what I had on VHS I have now replaced with DVD.  The images are crystal clear, scene selection is easier, and you get cool bonus features.  What I don't understand is HDDVD/Blue-Ray.  It seems like they're jumping the gun here, because they only offer better visual performance on high def TVs.  While high def has become standard on new TVs, my TV is over ten years old and is working just fine.  It replaced a TV that was fifteen years old.  TVs last for a long time, and it seems like not many people are going to have high def. TVs yet, so you'd get no benefit.  The only other benefit for High Def dvd/blue-ray is the play length.  Due to production standards and human attention spans, movies aren't getting any longer really.  Sure, you will be able to fit a whole trilogy on one blue-ray disk, but no one is going to sit and watch them all at once, so what's the point?  I think in another five years they will be ready to take over the industry, but right now, blue ray players are too expensive to buy just to have one or two movies that you can play on a handful of tvs.