Blu-ray, in General

[tavernier]

It's definitely happening, and it's the same transfer as the BFI disc - but I don't know about extras.

I put them in touch with a BFI contact with regard to the five shorts on the BFI disc, and also recommended contacting Švankmajer's company Athanor on the off-chance that HD versions of the shorts that didn't exist in 2011 have since been created, but your guess is as good as mine as to what they'll end up including.

(I got the impression that their extras budget was pretty tight.)

First Run's new Blu-ray of Svankmajer's Alice has no extras and only the English dub.

[MichaelB]

...and the BFI Blu-ray is region-free.

[FrauBlucher]

Dolby Atmos for bluray

[manicsounds]

So a capable receiver, plus more speakers including overhead speaker installation, necessary...

[Roger Ryan]

I love that the Dolby representative is promising the full, high overhead surround sound will be available on mobile devices! The last time I checked, the iPhone couldn't quite replicate the full-range theatrical mono of THE JAZZ SINGER.

[Zot!]

What is a SD Blu Ray?

[tenia]

What is a SD Blu Ray?

It's a Blu Ray where the PQ is obviously limited because the source used is terrible / in SD. However, the sound is usually good and in lossless.

[rspaight]

They're generally compressed less than DVDs, so there's some small PQ benefit, but yeah, the main draw is the sound.

[flyonthewall2983]

People complain about in on Blu-ray.com but I'd much rather have a good-sounding but poor-looking concert film than the other way around.

[domino harvey]

DVD can support PCM, can't it? I seem to recall Metric's concert film was released on DVD but came with a lossless audio option all the same

[flyonthewall2983]

I have DVDs from as far back as the late 90's with PCM soundtracks on it.

[jedgeco]

Criterion's The Magic Flute DVD has a PCM soundtrack.

[cdnchris]

As did Do the Right Thing.

[flyonthewall2983]

And a lot, if not all were just stereo mixes. It wasn't until Blu-ray that PCM started producing surround sound I believe.

[tenia]

Dvd perfectly supports PCM but there is a disc space issue : a PCM track (even if only 2.0) takes a lot of space and with only 7Gb, it can be tricky to accomodate.

[manicsounds]

DVDs can have a PCM 2.0 track at max. No 5.1 PCM tracks on DVD.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

The DVD-Video spec allows up to six channels of PCM audio. Actually it allows up to eight, but supposedly that isn't well supported by players and authoring applications. It's all kind of moot since AFAIK no commercially-released DVD has ever used more than two channels for a PCM track, presumably because of the space issue mentioned by tenia—according to this, a single six-channel PCM track would use more than 60% of available bitrate.

[tenia]

Not only the bitrate but also the disc space. I would need to check to be sure but I think a 2hr 5.1 PCM track on DVD was taking about 2Gb.
As for the bitrate, I believe it was in 16 bits so it would be 4.6 Mbps, indeed about 50% of the AV bitrate.

[flyonthewall2983]

Not Blu-ray specific, but Samsung has created a soundbar surround system which is Dolby Atmos-friendly.

[tenia]

Not Blu-ray specific, but Samsung has created a soundbar surround system which is Dolby Atmos-friendly.

If you're thinking of upgrading to Atmos, keep in mind that just over a couple dozen Blu-rays support the format so far

There's more than twice this figure (roughly 30 if you only count US titles) : http://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=248132" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[flyonthewall2983]

The "upward firing sound beams" sounds pretty cool.

[Adam X]

In answering a question about why, for Scream Factory's upcoming release of The Thing, it only received a 2K scan, rather than 4K,

Universal did the scan. If we had access to the element we would have done it in 4K, but we have no UHD 4K rights.

Am I reading this correctly and that this is now becoming a thing, where (some) studios won't allow access to elements for a 4K scan unless a label pays for the UHD rights on top of those for a BD/DVD release? Regardless of whether the label plans to release the film on UHD BD or not?
Any way to milk an extra dollar, I guess...

[tenia]

I never understood this type of logic, and I still dont. Universal only did a 2K scan with their own money, so they paid for that. Because of that, if they want to do an UHD, they will lack basic technical sales support to justify the release.
Instead, they could have had Shout paying a better 4k scan, allowing either one of them to do an UHD release if they wanted to. If Shout wouldnt have to, it wouldnt have changed anything UHD wise compared to the current situation.
Stupid.

[MichaelB]

It was just as baffling when Fox refused point blank to let Arrow do a new 2K scan of 35mm elements of Russ Meyer's The Seven Minutes, even though Arrow would have footed the bill and Fox would end up with a high-quality digital master that they'd own outright, and which would only be licensed to one territory, leaving the rest of the world up for grabs.

Needless to say, this argument was made.

[domino harvey]

Patriot's Day has a separate audio track for "late night viewing"-- is this just the regular audio with loud parts turned down?