There’s been a growing trend to have home theater equipment act like computers, which also imparts the lack of reliability, glitches, and incompatibility normally associated with the computer industry.

From long start-up times with HD-DVD and BluRay DVD players, to input connection incompatibilities... manufacturers’ quest for simplification and better specs is actually making home theater more complicated for the consumer. This is trend that must change or users will continue to negatively impacted by these actions.

Blue Ray and HD-DVD
The latest DVD incarnations act more like computers than anything that’s been created yet for home theater.  From 1.5-minute start up times, to similar delays upon inserting a DVD and viewing it, these players act like a computer starting up and can also crash during playback.

Granted these players are pushing the boundaries of the processing technology built into them, but so did the original DVD format when they first came out in 1996. Releasing technology that acts this badly is simply pathetic. Hopefully these issues are short lived.

1080p TVs
Many 1080p TVs also push the boundaries of processing. So much so that they slow the video down which causes it becomes out of sync with the audio. The fix? Buy a new receiver capable of delaying the audio to match the now delayed video. That’s nothing short of joke, and is simply the upgrade game/scam much of the computer industry does.

Being Forced to Buy
The industry has done connector changes before such as digital optical and coaxial cable for 5.1 surround, and consumers could choose whether or not to buy new receivers to take advantage of the new capabilities, or they could just connect the stereo audio connections to listen via Dolby Pro Logic or just plain stereo. With the 1080p TV video delay issue consumers don’t have a choice of whether to buy or not, their practically forced to buy a new receiver in order to fix the video delay issue. That’s not incompatibility… that’s equipment that shouldn’t have been released.

Consumer Expectations
Consumer expectations of how consumer electronics work versus how computers work are completely different. Computers are known for being quirky, thus requiring the user make sure equipment is compatible. With Consumer Electronics the expectation is that any TV should work with any DVD player along with any receiver. If the latest connection type isn’t available on one of the units, some degree of backward compatibility is expected to enable them to work.

The hard line stance of “If you don’t have it, oh well, buy another item that makes it work.” is straight out of the world of computers, and is a path of anti-consumer behavior that manufacturers would be well advised not to take.

Tread lightly.