I'm probably beating a dead horse to death-er... Not everyone has the money to upgrade their equipment. For example, I just built my first computer in 5 or 6 years. The machine I watched anime on was a Pentium 4 machine with Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty), but with the "Classic" Gnome desktop, because it can't handle Ubuntu's new desktop, "Unity". All of the software and codecs are up to date, but as it is, 8 bit playback is full of corruption of the video, because the hardware can barely handle it. 10 bit is impossible to watch on that old machine.
It took me 8 months to get the parts together to build my new machine, with an Intel i5 processor, but I'm single with no kids. Imagine people with families trying to upgrade their hardware - in THIS economy....
I say make the changes at a later date, and then phase the changes in gradually over time.
There seems to be an assumption that everyone has upgraded their hardware, but that assumption should not be made. NOT EVERYONE has new hardware. Look at me. I went from an Intel Pentium 4 machine to an Intel i5 based machine just this month, and look how long ago Pentiums were last thought about..... I'll bet a lot of you guys are thinking that everyone have been using Core Duo's or whatnot.... I know people who stopped using a computer - at home (to surf the web) (they go to the library and use the public PC's to check emails and whatnot) because their old Pentium III's don't support the latest web browsers, and they can't afford a new PC - yeah, in the United States - where I live.