Want to hang onto your old DVD's? It will cost you

[Woochifer]

This is a "costly" problem? I have a similar challenge in reverse. While the BR player, HD cable box and monitor all use DVI / HDMI connections, my older NAD receiver doesn't have HDMI connectivity. Solution: plug the audio into the audio receiver and the video into the monitor. Cost? One more button to push when switching sources.

rw

That's my situation as well, so I simply run all of the video sources through a HDMI switch. (Since my TV is more than 10' away from the AV rack, it saves me from having to buy three long HDMI cables) The HDMI switch automatically prioritizes and selects the sources, so there's not even an extra button to push.

[RGA]

Okay why do we need more than 2 HDMI cables? A Blu Ray player will play DVD and Blu Ray - that is one machine one HDMI out to the TV or receiver. What else are people connecting? Forget it - I am using a PS3 so I guess if you had a separate machine and a PS3 or XBOX you would need more connections.

Blu-Ray is great because they allow for backwards compatible technologies -DVD- to play in the machines. With the price of Blu Ray disc dropping like a stone. Shawshank Redemption for $14 - Bond movies for $7 at Wall-Mart - the prices are getting low enough that people won't bother downloading it because it's not worth the time.

Still some DVD's are still worth keeping as there is no Blu-Ray yet out for it. Or if it is a movie that you own on DVD but don't watch all that much and it's not a bastion of sound or picture then why not save the money and keep the DVD. Replace the movies that matter keep the lesser ones on DVD.

Also for me as a teacher I like to keep DVD's around that I can show to classes - as schools are usually woefully underfunded that Blu Ray is nowhere near coming to a classroom near me. They still mostly have 32 inch tube televisions and one school has a Laserdisc DVD combo player - which is kind of cool since I still have Laserdiscs. D'ohh :-)

[recoveryone]

You forgot about the cable box RGA, I use 3, 2 in and 1 out to the TV. other than that I agree 100% as my wife is a teacher also and just picked up a few DVD's for her math class to view. If not for our own gear she would be stuck using just a white board.