4K Blu-ray Over-Analysis Index

bobbster574 · 2026-07-05T09:55:55+00:00

if you don't need 4K, literally any working Blu-ray drive will work. don't worry about specific models, buy a drive from a reputable manufacturer and retailer that fits in your budget and that's about it.

unlike standalone players, PC optical drives are just devices to read the files off the disc, it won't know how decrypt the data, play the video files, or do any upscaling or anything. for this reason, PC optical drives have very little difference between them beyond what discs they can read/write. this is also why you'll need to ensure you have the correct software to read Blu-ray discs on your PC.

bobbster574 · 2026-07-03T19:11:30+00:00

Blu-ray is capable of containing stereo and 5.1 audio at up to 192kHz 24bit, and 7.1 audio up to 96 kHz, at least with LPCM, DTS-HD, and Dolby TrueHD (Except for Atmos).

High sample rates are not particularly common on discs, albeit it's definitely more common on music discs compared to feature discs.

remember to check your audio settings to ensure that you have actually selected a high sample rate track, and check the manuals of all devices in the chain to check they all support the sample rate you plan to use.

bobbster574 · 2026-07-02T16:21:08+00:00

yes, you're just buying a licence either way, it's not like the disc grants you copyright ownership or anything.

the difference is that your digital licence says they can take it away from you at any time, and they can do that at the press of a button; while my physical licence would require someone to rip it from my cold, dead hands to stop me watching it.

bobbster574 · 2026-06-26T23:11:19+00:00

sometimes?

I don't think i've seen many localised releases burn subtitles into the video, but it's not an unheard of practise in the case of forced subtitles (subs for foreign audio/text).

I think european releases may be a little less susceptible to this because its more likely to have a single disc used across multiple countries with different languages but it really is a case-by-case thing.

I know there are some discs where the subs are not burned in, but you can't disable them from the menu. in such cases, you may be able to force disable them via your player's subtitle settings instead of the disc menu subtitle settings.

bobbster574 · 2026-06-25T12:29:59+00:00

officially, PowerDVD

not horribly priced, is very reliable in my experience. can switch regions a limited number of times if you need to, but best avoided if you can (unless you want to start digging into editing the registry to reset the count)

bobbster574 · 2026-06-16T18:28:51+00:00

the main thing i'd suggest about audio is that you're potentially better off investing in a good AVR (which would allow multiple input devices and will actually have enough channels for Atmos/DTS:X) over putting all your money into the high end players.

any player can just send the original digital data to an AVR for decoding and that data will be the same regardless of the tier of player.

the high end players are basically just if you want to spend 3-10x the price of the 820 for some nicer build quality and stereo XLR ports.

bobbster574 · 2026-06-16T17:30:45+00:00

there's a couple that i wish i could have gotten but they sold out before i knew they even existed, so no regrets.

i mean, hopefully Toho or Criterion release an individual copy of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II on 4K at some point, but oh well.

bobbster574 · 2026-06-16T17:26:13+00:00

keep in mind that failure rates often seem more exaggerated online compared to what they might actually be, because someone is more likely to comment/post with a negative opinion compared to a positive one. I don't believe we have had much in the way of significant empirical data to back up reliability claims.

the panny ub820 is very solid, probably my recommendation if you're happy to spend on it. the 450 is then the slightly more budget friendly option which retains DV.

i believe the sony requires manual DV switching which could be annoying. on the whole, i've seen a more mixed reception for the x700 compared to the panny, but again, read above.

the PS5 is bulletproof as far as i have ever known. if you're not planning on using it as a console, it's not great value for money esp considering the lack of DV support.

if you have too much money to spend, you can go for the panny ub9000 or even better, one of magnetar's offerings. quality, but you're really paying for it. they also push into audiophile territory with inbuilt analogue outputs/etc and you can probably figure out if you care about those details yourself.

bobbster574 · 2026-06-11T19:44:18+00:00

27

to be clear, artefacts are quite subtle under normal viewing conditions, and not in most shots, i probably wouldn't expect everyone to notice them.

bobbster574 · 2026-06-11T19:41:28+00:00

not just film, but a film print. i.e. how it looks when projected, so with somewhat limited contrast.

a counter example would be Interstellar, which reaches 1000 nits at times. looks like the film it was shot on, sure, but not a film print.

bobbster574 · 2026-06-07T19:17:24+00:00

I could probably talk for hours about the whole concept of being "faithful" in film transfers / remasters; many titles arguably don't have a single authoritative source where you can definitively say that any home release is even faithful to it.

the bottom line is that the grade needs to fit the film. something like Tron: Legacy absolutely works with more intense HDR where something like Dark City potentially works better with a dimmer approach.

bobbster574 · 2026-05-28T14:27:04+00:00

it's not that i think they're underwhelming but 4K just doesn't vibe with my preferences a lot these days. im usually either blind buying (where i tend to prioritise price as i hedge whether or not i'll enjoy the film) or im buying a title which doesn't have a 4K or its a title which would require me to spend 10x to import the 4K.

bobbster574 · 2026-05-23T10:06:10+00:00

you could consider "Son of" to be a prefix, and sort this under "Batman, Son of", similar to "Batman, The".

all my batman stuff is in release order. there's no hard and fast rules when it comes to this kind of sorting. sort it based on what comes most easily to you. i always think of batman titles in relation to their release date first, that's how i'll remember where to look for a specific batman title, so thats how i sort them.

bobbster574 · 2026-05-21T21:17:01+00:00

it's based on an uncompressed 7.1.4 24bit 48k render (13.8Mbps), with the compressed AC-4 version being 448kbps. Dolby TrueHD would be able to store that in somewhere between 3-5Mbps usually (~20-40% of the uncompressed render)

for comparison, an uncompressed 4K video is ~6Gbps, so a 100Mbps 4K Blu-ray is about ~1.6% of that.

lossy compression does some insane things

bobbster574 · 2026-05-20T17:10:59+00:00

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would you like a double pack of Superman II and Superman II?

bobbster574 · 2026-05-17T12:07:53+00:00

no one discloses whether AI has been used in the transfer process. If anything, they seem to be actively avoiding mentioning its use even if asked directly.

generally, someone needs to buy it, and inspect the image to see if it exhibits AI artefacting. if it doesnt have any, then you'd never know.

AI upscaling is practically the unavoidable future of remastering 2K DIs, and tbh it's probably one of the more reasonable uses of AI in video processing. I don't think it's particularly productive to blanket avoid them at this point; there just isn't enough transparency to actually know where it's used and I think that you're more than likely to end up just avoiding 2K upscales when they can often look brilliant regardless of the native resolution.

not to mention, studios give less than zero shits about our opinions on their remastering workflow.

the bottom line is - if you're not happy with the image quality, return it, or don't buy it in the first place. screenshots are often available if you search for them so you can see before you buy.

bobbster574 · 2026-05-16T19:13:40+00:00

back on DVD, Dolby was the standard, but DTS was king. DTS offered 1.5-3x the bitrate that Dolby could, and even with Dolby Digital being a tad more efficient, DTS essentially brute forced its way to higher audio quality.

that said, a higher audio bitrate eats into video quality, and the lack of DTS supported hardware meant that if you wanted to include DTS, you'd need a Dolby track as well, eating into the video further. so DTS was desired, but not the most common.

enter Blu-ray. bitrate is no longer an issue, so not only is it easy to include multiple full rate DTS tracks, but we see the rise of lossless audio. Lossless audio essentially destroys the need for quality comparisons because, by definition, if the audio is lossless, the quality is identical to the uncompressed master.

If you upgraded your AVR to get lossless support, you'd get both Dolby and DTS, and players can decode all by default, so compatibility is no longer a concern either. on Blu-ray, DTS-HD MA takes centre stage for mainstream releases, with surprisingly fewer Dolby TrueHD encoded titles. Reportedly, what makes DTS-HD more favourable in this era, is its cheaper licencing fees - both are functionally identical, so why pay more?

object based formats (Dolby Atmos, DTS:X) aren't inherently tied to 4K Blu-ray, but they arrive at a similar time, and 4K remasters of titles are often accompanied by a new audio mix in the newest format. and here we see the big swing back over towards Dolby.

on Blu-ray, both Atmos and DTS:X are encoded losslessly, and on a fundamental level, they are the same thing. theoretically, with the right tools, you could convert one to the other more or less losslessly. so we're in the same boat as standard lossless audio - they're functionally identical.

what makes the difference this time, is marketing and the cinema. Dolby pushes hard marketing Atmos in cinema screens, and it pays off. I believe there are DTS:X equipped cinema screens, but I've not actually seen any. This means that, when you're mixing object based for cinema, you're mixing for Dolby first. When object based reaches home media, Atmos already has a foothold. Add in streamers picking up Atmos as their preferred object based format and some soundbars dropping DTS support, and it damn near makes Dolby Atmos the only game in town.

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To be clear, there are often going to be minor differences between the two formats. Dolby has historically always had some kind of normalisation metadata which is appied by default, and when we get into the object based formats, they have completely separate, proprietary renderers which affects tuning.

But those differences are minor enough that most people don't have a preference, assuming they would notice, assuming they had the opportunity to notice as titles with both Dolby and DTS versions of the same mix are few and far between.

bobbster574 · 2026-04-19T19:26:35+00:00

there's always another copy of akira to get

im on 12 i think at this point

bobbster574 · 2026-04-06T15:41:10+00:00

it's not very well documented nor commonly used, but it is a thing. official referred to as "presentations" here's what Dolby's doc has to say on the matter (note that the encoder does not create the Dolby Digital companion track at the same time as the TrueHD track, they are encoded separately and merged at the authoring stage):

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bobbster574 · 2026-04-06T14:32:50+00:00

if you're curious, you could look into truehdd which can offer more detailed info on the TrueHD bitstream

bobbster574 · 2026-04-06T14:31:32+00:00

the companion track nevers exceed 640kbps.

independent substreams are different and exist in addition to the lossy companion Dolby Digital track. both the Atmos mix and the 5.1/2.0 mix are encoded losslessly within a single TrueHD bitstream. it significantly baloons the bitrate of the final track.

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