blu-ray

Native 4K, HEVC at 44.91 Mbps, 1.85:1, Dolby Vision and HDR10. That is the spec line on Disney's Dead Poets Society disc now that reviews are in, and it is about what you would hope for a 1989 drama that nobody needs to look like a demo reel. The new restoration was done from the original 35mm...

The complaint doing the rounds about the new Magoo Christmas Carol disc comes with a very specific example, and it's the detail that makes me believe it. During the All Alone In The World sequence, the words and images on the chalkboard reportedly disappear as the camera pans across them...

If you have ever paid over the odds for an out of print Warner Archive disc, there is a thread worth bookmarking. Someone over at Home Theater Forum keeps a running list of catalogue titles where the HD digital appears to come from the same scan Warner Archive used for the Blu-ray, and nothing...

The disc versus stream argument gets made badly nearly every time, and the reason is that people argue about the delivery format when the thing doing most of the work is upstream of it. Yes, a 4K disc carries far more data than any stream you can buy, and yes, that shows up first in the places...

I keep a couple of 5.1 only titles in the demo pile precisely because they wreck the assumption that more channels equals better sound, and the best of them just turned ten. Don't Breathe hit cinemas on 26 August 2016, which is the awkward part of its life story. 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray had only...

Sound & Vision put out a late-summer roundup of 4K and Blu-ray TV series box sets, and it reminded me that series collections are the last physical purchases I make without hesitating. Films I'll rent, stream, whatever. A show I know I'll rewatch across a decade, I want on a shelf. The reason...

Somebody on Reddit put Sonic 3 up as their new family friendly Atmos reference disc, sitting just behind The Wild Robot, and their existing rotation is Top Gun Maverick, Saving Private Ryan and Avatar Fire and Ash. Their description of it is the useful part: no real LFE punch, but roughly every...

House of the Dragon season three is up for pre-order on 4K UHD in the UK, dated 30 November, with a steelbook running alongside the standard edition. The listing is more interesting than these usually are. Eight extended episodes, a twenty minute featurette flagged as exclusive to physical, and...

Twenty years on from August 2006 and Talladega Nights is getting a 4K disc, with a review already up at HTF. I have not seen a word about the transfer itself yet, so I am going in with questions rather than opinions. Mid-2000s studio comedies are an awkward category on 4K. Films from that...

The American branch of Umbrella Entertainment has announced Goodbye Paradise, Carl Schulz's 1983 Australian neo-noir with Ray Barrett, Robyn Nevin, Kate Fitzpatrick, John Clayton and Lex Marinos. Date given is September 29. That is the entire announcement, which is my recurring complaint with...

Home Cinema Choice ran a retrospective on the birth of Blu-ray and it reminded me how much of the standard story is wrong. The usual telling is that Warner switched sides and HD DVD folded. True, but it's the ending, not the reason. The context the piece sets up matters. By 2000 DVD was already...