I think that DVD is the bees knees. I love the fact that the discs don't wear out if you watch them over and over again. I love the fact that they don't take up as much room as videos.
I have a DVD player built into my computer with a set of Dolby Pro-Logic speakers. The best thing of all is that it means that I can have a film on while I am beavering away at typing up my university notes in Word and have a window showing me the film in the top corner of the screen.
The downsides of DVD are, of course, that at the moment they are pretty much a read-only format. There are two recordable formats battling it out for supremacy (DVD-RAM and another one which I can't remember) and until that battle is resolved I doubt people will embrace recordable DVD. A lot of us will remember the Betamax/VHS battle when videos first came out and I'm sure there are those of us who had Betamax videos which then became virtually redundant.
The other enourmous downside of DVD's is the high price of buying a film on DVD. They are about twenty quid to buy so I won't buy a DVD unles it is on sale. This is a brilliant way of getting the British public to embrace this new technology. Price the films at such a high price that people say "Sod it, I'm not spending that much."
One other drawback that occurs with some DVD-players is that certain films won't play on them or the soundtrack is out of synch with the pictures. These are insane niggles that should never, never happen in this day and age. There is no excuse for it.
Obviously, most people who have DVD players have them because they came with their new PC. I love my DVD player (even though I've only got 3 films on DVD) because it makes my PC into the ultimate home entertainment system. It plays music CD's, games, surfs the internet and plays DVD's. And it lets me work as well.
DVD will be the future because it is popular in Japan and America and probab
ly in other countries as well. We are slowly coming around to it in this country and when the recordable DVD battle is decided, it could well be the end of VHS.