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 the House that Dragons Built shorts covering each of the eight episodes. Everything else is listed as bonus content, details TBC, which is how you know the page went up before the authoring was locked.
The extended cuts are the argument for me. Not the transfer, not the audio track. Eight longer versions exist and, going by how these releases normally play out, the disc is where they stay. That plus a featurette labelled physical-exclusive is HBO deciding discs still need a reason to exist, and I will take it.
The transfer I am less relaxed about. Dragon is a dark show with a lot of low-light dragon compositing, and low-light CG is precisely where streaming bitrates come apart into blocking and banding. It is the material a disc should win on by a mile. I remember people here saying the season two discs held together better than Max did on the same scenes, though I never ran the comparison myself, and nobody has said a word yet about the encode on this one.
Pre-ordering in August for a disc that ships at the end of November on a spec sheet marked TBC is a slightly daft thing to do, and I will probably do it.
Has anyone actually put the season two 4K disc against Max on the night sequences? Curious how wide the gap really was.
The extended cuts are the argument for me. Not the transfer, not the audio track. Eight longer versions exist and, going by how these releases normally play out, the disc is where they stay. That plus a featurette labelled physical-exclusive is HBO deciding discs still need a reason to exist, and I will take it.
The transfer I am less relaxed about. Dragon is a dark show with a lot of low-light dragon compositing, and low-light CG is precisely where streaming bitrates come apart into blocking and banding. It is the material a disc should win on by a mile. I remember people here saying the season two discs held together better than Max did on the same scenes, though I never ran the comparison myself, and nobody has said a word yet about the encode on this one.
Pre-ordering in August for a disc that ships at the end of November on a spec sheet marked TBC is a slightly daft thing to do, and I will probably do it.
Has anyone actually put the season two 4K disc against Max on the night sequences? Curious how wide the gap really was.
