physical media

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...

Somewhere in Time has turned up as a 4K UHD preorder, which for a 1980 catalogue title with a following this devoted is not a small thing. What has not turned up is any word on where the picture is coming from. No mention of a new scan, no note on who graded it, no extras list, nothing about the...

Cord Cutters flagged the anniversary this week and it is worth sitting with for a second. On 8 August 2017, on a quarterly earnings call, Disney said it was building its own streaming service and ending the licensing deal that had been putting its films on Netflix. Disney+ itself did not arrive...

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...

What Hi-Fi ran this as their Home Cinema Week debate in July, ended up split down the middle, and have now kicked it out to readers. Tom Parsons argued the hardware case, that USTs and 100-inch sets have made a big picture trivially easy compared to a decade ago. Alastair Stevenson argued the...

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...

Severin has put The War Game and Threads out on 4K UHD, and the disc spec on the Watkins film is the odd one. The War Game is a 48 minute 16mm black-and-white BBC telefilm from 1966, 1.33:1, and it arrives with Dolby Vision and HDR10 grades plus DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono spread across the two...

There is a What Hi-Fi piece doing the rounds about disc wallets and it is worth reading if you have shelved the cases and put everything into sleeves, which a lot of us have once the collection outgrows the room. Three failure modes. The act of sliding a disc into a tight sleeve puts fine...