lordjedi said:

unfortunately unless YET ANOTHER FUTURE FORMAT comes out, with people

looking ahead to address these problems with HD content, we're just going

to go through this cycle yet again with something else (hopefully NOT BLU-RAY 2,3 etc)

Yep. Since the media companies are stupid, you can bet that when the next best thing comes along, they'll argue about what to put in the standard. They'll either come to an agreement or we'll have yet another format war. That isn't likely to happen for another 10-20 years though, so it's a ways off.

The "next generation" of media player is already here - flash memory cards. It's a matter of waiting for cost vs. capacity to come down. That's the ideal "player" when you think about it - no moving parts to break down.