VHS is not obsolete. Movies are still made for it. Also, there were lots of movies made before 1994 or whatever that did not benefit in terms of quality to DVD.
The same will be true for DVD. What will be bad about your movies??? Unless if they were originally filmed in 1080p/60
fps movies that have already been produced cannot benefit from the new formats.
Also, do you own a Qualia TV or something with LCoS or SXRD??? There are not too many TVs that do native 1080i resolution and none I can think of that have native 1080p/60fps (which is what Blue Ray claims it can do). DLPs and LCDs will upconvert the signal from
720p to 1080i. If you do not own a TV that does native 1080i resolution, you will not get the full potential of either HD format.
Also, I highly doubt they will use the full bitrates of the discs. They say the HD will be at 25mbps, but if they do that a 2 hour movie will take up almost the entire disc with 1 audio track. A video only at 25mbps will be about 22.5Gb (21.45Gb on PC). Now if you add audio at 5376kbps (assuming they use good quality audio) it will be another 4,83GB (4.61 on PC). Add them up and you get just over 25GB.
Now, how many DVDs do you know of without special features extra audio and such??? I estimate that HD movies will be at 15mbps, which is not much more than DVDs can display.
Now if they decide to use lossy audio, it will be possible, but what is the point of a $1000 player and $100 movies if you get lossy audio (I am estimating prices, but they will not be that far off at introduction).
Now to answer your questions:
1 - No. It will not make DVDs obsolete. Blue Ray has a higher chance of going obsolete before DVD. I say this because the next technology was out for quite some time now (the one that is beyond Blue Ray), but there is no market for it. There is a chance that the success of Blue Ray or HD-DVD will open the HVD market which can store up to 1.5TB on 1 disc. That can easily hold full
bitrate video with many uncompressed multi-channel tracks. Also, this has a chance of being cheaper than Blue Ray media.
2 - I have not read anyhing about it, but if they do not play back DVDs, then they will lose too much sales. How many people will want to completely dump DVD? If this is the case, than DVHS would have been more popular.
Part two questions:
1 - As long as you have a DVD movie and a DVD player there will always be a need to back up your movies. There is no reason to stop making blank DVDs. Actually it will be better since DVDR DL media will drop in price. This means it will be easier to make 1:1 copies. Also, companies will spend less time on money on improving copy "protection" schemes so DVD Ripping software will not need constant updating, however this will take at least 3 years after the release of the new format.
2 - The drop in price is a good thing and does not reflect the new format since it is not out yet. I would not recommend Memorex though, since many people have had problems with them.
Just an extra note... You probably never saw a DVD movie that uses the full
bitrate of a DVD. A DVD can take 9800kbps total. For a 2 hour movie, this would be 8.82GB (8.411 on PC). However, you never see a movie that is 2 hours take more than 5GB. Stealth for example was just over 2 hours and the movie was about 3.5GB. The reason is as I stated in the beginning, there are too many extra features, previews and other crap in movies.
