DVD players themselves seem to have declined markedly in quality since they became commodities. I have a new-ish blu-ray player that baulks at the layer change

DVD players themselves seem to have declined markedly in quality since they became commodities. I have a new-ish blu-ray player that baulks at the layer change on a DVD, or refuses to play some titles. I also have a high quality Sony upscaling player I bought at a thrift shop that will play anything. I will be unhappy when that dies. Unfortunately, the introduction of HDMI seemed to coincide with the drop in quality of DVD players so you may have to buy a chain of chinese dongles to get the good quality players to work in your lounge. Ripping your DVDs is probably a good idea, not because of the playability issues to do with the disks themselves, but to do with finding a decent, working DVD player at any price. edit: the main problem I have with commercial streaming media is that they are using all the nasty tricks of DVD to compress the image below what you can notice on a modern TV. Crushed blacks, blockiness when the stream gets compromised by traffic etc. Blu-ray held such promise and it can look fantastic with a higher average bit stream rate than streaming, but they are getting harder to purchase as the retail outlets disappear.