[smitopher]

So, as in all things computer and consumer electronics, the Tail (Legacy and Proprietary standards) wags the Dog (What we want to do now)

Bit unfair - the "legacy" standards are what let you plug one device into another and get pictures, sound, blacks that are black, whites that are white, circles that are circular and fields in the right order...

If you were only playing properly mastered content it wouldn't be a problem. MPEG2 DVDs and H264/MPEG2/VC-1 Blu-rays and MPEG2/H264 DVB/ATSC stuff would almost certainly be fine - they have fixed vertical resolutions. It's the oddball remastered and web stuff with non-standard resolutions that are really the issue, plus some interlaced differences between codecs and line standards.

Plus PCs are not brilliant at video standard stuff.

Maybe our hobby might migrate to purpose built hardware? And the software might allow for more transparent handling of "supported content" that has been "properly mastered"?

Standards evolve. I hope that someday 23.976Hz will be a historical curiosity, HDCP and all other forms of DRM will be regarded with the contempt they deserve and MKV/FLAC will be the defacto standards with which everybody complies.

Ain't I naive?

[noggin]

Maybe our hobby might migrate to purpose built hardware?

I think as time goes on the opposite is more likely - as codecs become more advanced and integration of functionality (look at how we now have SoCs rather than North Bridge and South Bridge and GPUs) more entrenched I suspect we'll be moving more in the opposite direction. DIY hardware is more likely to be along the lines of Raspberry Pi Compute Module integration like the Five Ninjas Slice I suspect.

And the software might allow for more transparent handling of "supported content" that has been "properly mastered"?

Standards evolve. I hope that someday 23.976Hz will be a historical curiosity, HDCP and all other forms of DRM will be regarded with the contempt they deserve and MKV/FLAC will be the defacto standards with which everybody complies.

Personally wrappers like MKV matter less to me than codec support. You can rewrap MKV to TS to MP4 quite easily. It's HEVC vs AVC vs MPEG2 etc that are the bigger issues I guess. MKV is just the parcel that the codecs come wrapped in.

Ain't I naive?

Yep...

And to be honest, codecs and wrappers are kind of irrelevant in your original point - it's video standards like 480i, 576i, 720p, 1080i and 1080p coupled with codecs, and subsampling and interconnect standards that dictate how we acquire, master and distribute content these days.