Blu-ray, in General

[Finch]

Nostalgia for the Light Blu-Ray is coming courtesy of Icarus on 13 September. Can't wait!

[eerik]

Includes five short films by Patricio Guzmán as special features.

[zedz]

Includes five short films by Patricio Guzmán as special features.

As if it wasn't already an essential purchase.

[swo17]

Re: black bars and aspect ratios, here's a new one for the books: At my father-in-law's tonight, he was watching a program that was being broadcast windowboxed, where an appropriate way to watch it would have actually been to zoom in and fill the entire screen. Instead, he insisted on stretching the image horizontally, but not vertically, accomplishing the enviable task of both distorting the image and retaining the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. (Not sure what the aesthetic reasoning was here.) He would occasionally leave the room and I would change the ratio, only for him to put it back when I wasn't looking. This kept happening until eventually my family asked me to stop. We are losing the battle here, folks!

[Doctor Sunshine]

Just a few months ago, getting our cable hooked up, the guy told me he'd reconfigured our TVs so that they'd automatically stretch the SD channels as that's what most people prefer. It's scary out there.

[TMDaines]

With SkyHD in the UK the SD 4:3 content, at least when sent through an HDMI cable, is automatically stretched to fill the screen and, as far as I know it, there's no way to stop this due to a technical limitation with the set-top box. On the HD channels the 4:3 image is correctly pillarboxed but for SD content you have to change the aspect ratio of the TV to re-squeeze the image in order to have the correct ratio. This then, rather annoyingly, means the digital programming guide or menus are all squashed. It wasn't until Comedy Central started having an HD channel that I realised I had been watching Two & a Half Men stretched from 4:3 to 16:9.

Can an American clarify something for me? Is a lot of SD content on SD channels in the US shown in 4:3 even when 16:9 footage is presumably available? I ask this as a lot of SD content we get from American programmes is often in 4:3 instead of the 16:9 ratio when it is shown in HD. We don't tend to have this disparity with UK programming. The same programme tends to be in the same ratio regardless of whether it is SD/HD (even though a lot of people don't realise this due to the stretching issue noted above). Furthermore as a wrestling fan I watch streams on the Internet a lot and when the stream was from an American SD source it was often 4:3 and when from an American HD source it was 16:9.

[domino harvey]

SD channels usually just show letterboxed versions of the HD material

[Roger Ryan]

While the major networks will, indeed, simply show letterboxed widescreen material on their SD signal, I've noticed that news programming (and all news networks) will simply lop off the ends of the image and send it out as 4:3. Routinely, lower third graphics will simply be cut off because they are designed to be seen in widescreen.

HD channels actually have had greater problems. IFC-HD has been showing cropped 4:3 episodes of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT stretched to fill a 16:9 space (very frustrating since the entire series was shot in 16:9!). In the past, TBS-HD and TNT-HD were known to distort 4:3 masters to artificially fill a 16:9 space when the programming (often films) had originally been shot in a widescreen format - I have to assume the networks didn't want the expense of acquiring a new (proper) master or one was not available. I thought this had been improving somewhat in recent years, but HBO routinely crops 2.35:1 ratio films to 1.78:1 to avoid black bars. Netflix Streaming has been notorious for bad encodes where the image doesn't resemble any known aspect ratio and remains distorted no matter how you adjust your TV.

[PillowRock]

SD channels usually just show letterboxed versions of the HD material

That can vary wildly from network to network.

When TNT runs their syndicated re-runs of Bones recent enough to have been produced in HD 16:9 they always pan & scan it to fill their SD feed. Their HD feed then takes that P&S version and stretches that, at the broadcast source, to fill the available space.

Of course, it has also become common practice that new documentary TV productions (such as on the History Channel, but also on all of the sports channels) become well nigh indecipherable when they show actual video of things that happened in the 20th century. They insist on panning and scanning the 4:3 video / film footage to fill the 16:9 screen; except that they never do any panning, and just show the middle portion all of the time.

[Drucker]

Saw this on bluray.com:

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Chinatown ... 6098/#News" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Chinatown, with no release date or any other information except a box. Has that been there, long? Anyone know anything about this?

[andyli]

Yes. Long long time. Plus the box art is just a generic blu-ray case and a poster photoshopped together.

[mfunk9786]

If there's no release information, it's just a placeholder.

[flyonthewall2983]

John Landis, on Kevin Pollak's show Sunday, revealed the work being done on a Three Amigos BR with 20 minutes of unseen material.

[Jeff]

John Landis, on Kevin Pollak's show Sunday, revealed the work being done on a Three Amigos BR with 20 minutes of unseen material.

Amazon put it up for pre-order ($10.49) a couple of days ago. No date yet. Definitely a childhood fave.

[dx23]

Don't know where else to put it, but I read around the net that the recently released blu-ray of Executive Decision has scenes involving the Quran and Islamic prayers removed. If this is true, I find this decision by WB completely despicable.

[David M.]

Outrageous. What were they thinking?

[AlexHansen]

Just a little peculiarity I found interesting: For those of you with the first season of Louie, if you set your player for Region B it'll skip all the ads/promos at the start of the disc.

[mfunk9786]

That is an awesome tip, thanks!

[aox]

but but... I paid good money for those!

[Finch]

If anyone finds the upcoming Blu-Ray of Nostalgia for the Light for less than the $35 that Amazon US are asking for, can you post a link or PM me? That'd be much appreciated.

[matrixschmatrix]

I'm having a hard time even finding anywhere else that has it listed.

[g.schweet]

Overstock.com has it at $20.22 right now. I've never used them for blu-rays or dvds before though.

[Finch]

Great price but they won't ship this internationally. Bugger. May have to wait until after the street date to see what marketplace sellers are charging.

[perkizitore]

They DO ship internationally.

[Finch]

Scroll down a little and you'll see the red disclaimer "This product cannot be shipped internationally". It certainly won't let me add it to the cart.

PS.: Changing the country from the UK to the US when creating the account doesn't help since you'll have to change destinations again for the checkout at which point it produces the same message.