will present day video formats be supported in the future?

[take5]

will present day video formats, divx 5, rv9, wm9, etc., be supported 5, 10, 15, 20 years in the future?

i built up a really good library of movies, tv shows, cartoons, etc. will my kids and or their kids be able to watch them in the future?

i didn't just do all this hard work for the short-term did i?

[DJ Bobo]

Who knows!
I think, there is no format that can last more than 30 years.

Even if DivX won't be supported in 10 years, there is nothing to worry about, BlueRay discs are coming, they have at least 25GB capacity.
When DivX is about to fall, just reencode to another format (MPEG-?).
Thinking that PCs in 10 years will be hyper fast, you won't even need 5 minutes to reencode :D

[Teegedeck]

Very probably they'll think up new encoding techniques that make good use of all the CPU power we'll have by then, so don't count on it.

As for codecs; you're definitely on the safer side if you use an MPEG-compliant codec, like XviD or DivX5. M$ or Real or whoever might just dump all support for their current codecs and go for something new, happened before. And if something ain't a common standard but is only pushed by M$ or some other single corporation, you might imagine that there'll be little incentive for third parties to support it any longer in that case.

[ppera2]

I expect that there will be always some way to conversion, and very likely even for direct playback of all today's popular formats.

Maybe we will have not CD (DVD) players in future computers, but someone will have it, so can copy to new medias. As it goes now with old 8 inch floppies for example.