HDTV ready? 480p kills me..

there are no 1080i dvd players, since all dvds are 480 vertical lines max (or 576 or someshit in PAL countries).

There are some DVD players that upconvert to 1080i, I believe. Check out avsforum, those guys know all this stuff.

..sounds like you guys have good tv-sets. if they happen to have a vga-input you surely should check it out, too. i bought a vga-module for my tv one wise day and feed it using mplayer sonce then. very nice about this is that i can watch practically every format, not only dvds. the quality is awesome, actually to good for bad sources..