physical media

DVD in 1996, Blu-ray in 2006, UHD Blu-ray in 2016. Ten years apart each time, tidy enough that you could set a calendar by it, so 2026 was supposed to hand us the next one. Instead the Blu-ray Disc Association is on record saying it is not developing an 8K format. That is not a delay, that is...

The cadence everyone quotes is DVD in 1996, Blu-ray in 2006, UHD Blu-ray in 2016, so 2026 was meant to be the year the next thing showed up. It didn't, and the Blu-ray Disc Association has said it isn't working on an 8K format at all. That is basically the whole story: no standard in progress...

Someone raised the Curzon label question over on HTF and it hit a nerve, because I have been round this loop with boutique art-house discs more than once. The Three Colors Trilogy UHD gets pointed to as the example of them doing it properly. Then you go looking for Paris, Texas and it is out of...

A review went up for the 1974 Guillermin and Irwin Allen Fox picture on Blu-ray, and my first thought was not about resolution at all. With a seventies disaster film the thing that makes or breaks a disc is how the audio and the effects photography have been handled, and that is where these...

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...

Someone on Home Theater Forum put the collector's dilemma better than I've managed to. He wants pre-2015 Blu-rays of things like Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Rain Man, The English Patient, The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Fugitive, but keeps not buying them in case a 4K edition turns up, and...

Someone over on Home Theater Forum asked the question I've been dodging for about five years: do you buy the pre-2015 Blu-ray of a major film now, or leave a hole on the shelf in case a 4K disc shows up? His list was Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Rain Man, The English Patient, The Adventures of...

The Toy Story 5 disc details landed and one line is worth flagging: it is shipping on a 100GB 4K Blu-ray. Disney almost always uses the 66GB tier unless a film runs long, and this one is 102 minutes. Short film, biggest disc. That is more bitrate headroom than a 102-minute animated feature...

There is a thread going about Life Goes On, the 1989 to 1993 network drama, started by someone who found episodes uploaded to YouTube and realised the show has almost no home video presence. Season one came out on DVD in 2006 and then the releases simply stopped. That pattern shows up often...

What Hi-Fi has run a physical media flag-waving piece, and the recommended 4K Blu-ray players are the Sony UBP-X700K in the middle, the Panasonic DP-UB820 as the overall pick and the DP-UB9000 at the top. If those names feel familiar it is because they have been the answer for years. The piece...

The Dolby Vision 2 story that matters this week is not the TV rollout, it is a one-line statement from Sony. After Dolby confirmed DV2 can be enabled on existing 4K Blu-ray players with firmware, TechRadar went and asked the player makers whether they would do it. Sony's answer was that it has...

SoundGuys spent time with a couple of the small desk sized CD players doing the rounds, the FiiO and the Fosi, and the conclusion was the one I keep arriving at myself: nice objects, but they cannot take over from the optical drive you already have. They play a disc and that is the whole job...

There is a thread doing the rounds again asking Disney to reopen the anthology vault, the Disneyland and Wonderful World of Disney and Wonderful World of Color material, and floating a retro line to sit where the Treasures tins and the Movie Club exclusives used to be. I would buy it tomorrow. I...

Been going through upcoming release lists and it hit me the same way it hit a thread I was reading: nearly everything getting announced now starts in the 70s. Timeless is still putting out early material, Shout has clearly swung toward 70s shows, you get the occasional MPI or Warner title, but...

Worth getting the scale right before anyone reaches for a torch: this is one reported customer, not a wave. A Reddit user says the Extended Edition trilogy they bought through the Play Store in 2022 vanished from their library, and the screenshots they shared show support confirming the title...

Worth reading this one carefully before the pitchforks come out, because it is a single reported customer and not a mass deletion. A Reddit user says the Extended Edition Lord of the Rings trilogy they bought through the Google Play Store in 2022 vanished from their library. The screenshots they...

Criterion's complete Kubrick set is dated 20 October in the US and the disc count is thirty. Thirteen features and three shorts, all restored in 4K, UHDs presented in Dolby Vision. The line that matters to me is sitting in the spec sheet where most people will skip it: the original soundtracks...

Disney announced the Toy Story 5 disc details and the interesting part is buried near the bottom. The film runs 102 minutes and it is shipping on a 100GB disc. Disney's default for anything that is not a three hour epic is 66GB, and Archer says he double checked this with Disney twice because it...

Someone on Reddit went to watch the Extended Edition trilogy they bought from Google Play back in 2022 and found it gone. Not delisted, not shuffled into a different tier, just gone from a library they had paid for. When they asked Google for a refund or a gift card, the chat agent told them the...

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...