An evil sorcerer tricked Aladdin’s wife into giving him the magic lamp by offer to swap new lamps for old. It’s no trick this time around, however, as Warner Brothers has launched a campaign that lets you trade in your old WB DVDs in exchange for the same titles in Blu-ray format. They have set up a new site, www.dvd2blu.com, where you can make the exchange. Just select the titles online that you want to swap, then mail back the DVDs, and you’ll get your Blu-ray discs in about a month.

No, it’s not a free exchange. It will cost $7.95 or more per disc, and you can only swap one disc for a given title. You’re also limited to 25 titles. If your order comes to more than $25, shipping is free (instead of $4.95 per order). And Warner Brothers will recycle the DVDs that get returned in this program, and the components will be reused.

Okay, so it could cost you almost $15 to swap a single title, but less than $32 to exchange four titles is not such a bad deal even with the lower prices of Blu-ray titles these days. And with some Blu-ray players going for as little as $100, maybe this will help encourage people to start switching over their libraries of favorite movies to the new format.

Unfortunately, I still think that most people see standard DVDs as being “good enough“, and are not likely to buy a new player to get high definition movies at home.

Posted by Alfred Poor, November 18, 2009 5:00 AM