All good things must come to an end.

The DVD player in my Media Room system appears to have croaked. It’s a trusty Denon DVD-2200 that, if I recall correctly, just had its tenth birthday.

Troubleshooting it was easy: it’s not working.

More specifically, if you care, it’s not loading discs, and the front panel is displaying random functions unrelated to any button pushes. That indicates that the control board is toast.

I’m loathe to dispose of it, and I dislike how our culture has developed a throwaway mentality towards electronics.

Fortunately there’s still a repair shop in town that works on Denon products. I took it there, and I’ll know after the long weekend whether it can be repaired and whether it’s cost-effective to do so.

The question I’m asking myself right now is, do I still need a DVD player?

I don’t want a Bluray player. I’ve never wanted a Bluray player, and I’ve stated my case several times over the years on rAVe that Bluray is already a dinosaur; that hardcopy formats are not long for this world.

In fact, the only way that Bluray discs have snuck into my house is when they’re bundled as a 3-pack as so many movies are these days: DVD, Bluray, and digital copy for mobile devices.

We still buy a fair number of 3-format movies, if only because they’re right there in front of us at Costco and it’s a compelling value proposition.

That said, most of our video content is bought on iTunes and either watched on iPads or on the big screen in the Media Room via Apple TV.

Still, we do have a substantial number of films on DVD, and I am disinclined to rebuy them on iTunes.

With that in mind I may end up having to shop around for a new DVD player that, yes, also plays Bluray.