"I see your Schwartz is as big as mine."

It's happening again.

After 10 years of carefully collecting more than 500 of my favorite movies on DVD, the home-video format is changing. HD-DVD and Blu-Ray have duked it out, and the latter has emerged victorious. It's the beginning of the end for my DVD collection.

My first laserdisc :)

Technology can be so cruel. It's like that scene at the end of The Last Samurai, when Tom Cruise and his fellow warriors are approaching the enemy on horseback. They have their swords out, ready to slice and dice... and then the enemy hauls out a machine gun and mows them all down.

It's all happened to me before. The summer I was 14 years old, I was flush with paper-route money, so I decided to invest in a nice Pioneer laserdisc player. My first laserdisc was the special edition of The Abyss (which ran more than $100, but I got it for about a fraction of that when I signed up for a Columbia House membership). I was agog! James Cameron's underwater sequences looked crystal clear on my 27" Panasonic TV, and the AC-3 sound shook my bedroom walls. This was like going to the movies, except you didn't have to sneak around to watch R-rated stuff.

When I got to college, I had an impressive collection of laserdiscs, all great movies by estimable directors (the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing, David Lynch's Lost Highway, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction). I found out that another guy in my dorm, Jeff Lee, had a laserdisc collection. It was cool to meet someone else who was pretentious and geeky enough to invest in this weird format, with its 12" discs and limited storage capacity (no more than an hour of film on each side). But Jeff had me beat. Not only was his laserdisc collection larger than mine (this is ultimately a story about guys measuring themselves, isn't it?), but he'd already started collecting DVDs. He even had that timeless Eddie Murphy classic, Metro.

Damn you, Coppola!

It didn't take long for me to discover that DVD was the better format. It could hold hours of more stuff on a single disc, it was cheaper and less bulky, and the picture was clearer, though the sound quality was the same as (if not a step down from) laserdiscs. Impulsively, I started buying DVDs. It wasn't as if I threw away my laserdiscs. It's just that, at some point, they found their way into my closet.

Now, I see a similar fate for my DVDs. I hang out with my friends, with their high-def players and high-def TVs, and the machine gun is hauled out once more to mow down my collection. Watching movies on DVD is like viewing the action through a pristine window pane. Watching them on Blu-Ray is like opening up the window and walking around inside.

Just look at some of the movies that have been released on Blu-Ray in recent months: Gangs of New York, The Mist, The Proposition, Sweeney Todd. These are some of my favorite movies of recent years. Paramount even released a Blu-Ray of The Godfather. The Godfather, for chrissakes! Like I'm not going to own that.

The only question is, "What's going to supplant Blu-Ray?" Will physical collections of movies become a thing of the past, replaced by online queues and digital code? Maybe the future of watching movies isn't a disc but an online service like Openfilm.

Look, I found a way to shill for the Website! As a great man (I think his name was George McFly) once said, "If you put your mind to it, you can promote anything."