Pendell

Ordered It's A Wonderful Life on blu-ray cuz it's pretty alright I guess, and then ordered The Polar Express on 4K because it's actually the greatest Christmas film ever made

There is a 4K of It's A Wonderful Life but I decided not to, because where the blu-ray versions include one blu-ray of the black & white version and a second blu-ray of the colorized version, the 4K set includes a 4K of the black & white version and the same standard blu-ray of the colorized version.

Now, I understand including 3 or 4 discs in a release of It's A Wonderful Life just for completionist's sake would be a pretty big ask, but also. That just annoys me ever so slightly too much to want to spend the extra five or so bucks on the 4K. I think I'll be fine with the blu-ray.

Even though I have no practical use for it, I've ordered a single Panasonic brand 100GB BD-RE XL, imported from Japan, just for the hell of it. Also the disc and jewel case inserts look sexy, can you blame me.

And noticed something in the article about Alder Lake CPUs (Intel 12K models):

The CPU family no longer features Intel SGX which is a requirement for playing UltraHD Blu-Ray discs.

So if you've never fucked with optical media on a PC, it can be a surprisingly annoying chore. Even a lot of DVDs have fucked copy protection that requires software workarounds (VLC maintains those libraries, thanks yall) and I can only imagine blu-rays are even more fucked.

So without having read more into this at all, obviously there has to be ways to play back newer blu-ray disks with software workarounds, though I'm curious if it's similar to DVD copy protection or if there's more hoops to jump through. The fact that, officially, playback is limited to CPUs that have a hilariously flawed security feature is pretty absurd. Given when this became a thing there's a good chance AMD CPUs were never officially supported too.

Again I'm writing this without looking any of it up past what I initially read here, because I enjoy the conversation. So I may be very wrong about a lot of this.

4K Blu-rays introduced a new layer of encryption on top of standard blu-rays that required some goofy bullshit CPU feature to "properly" decrypt. And it did indeed never support AMD CPUs.

From what I can tell, this was only really the case because the only legitimately licensable way to play 4K Blu-rays was probably through some Cyberlink software suite that cost another $100 on top of the 4K Blu-ray drive you bought for your PC. I really can't imagine there being that many "legitimate" home theater PC enthusiasts who would bother with any of this, or how many people got "screwed" when this was made impossible on newer CPUs.

If you use any of the popular Blu-ray ripping apps - AnyDVD HD or MakeMKV for the most part - those apps can bypass these security features easily, almost instantly, no matter what CPU you're using. So it's 100% certainly an arbitrary limitation imposed upon people who want to do things legally. As usual, the DRM only fucks over the consumers who want to do things "the right way".

Notably though, most PC Blu-ray drives cannot actually achieve the read speeds required for 4K Blu-rays when treating them as data discs, and presumably the "legitimate" software would kick the drive into some special mode to read the disc at the right speed. With the ripping tools, it generally can't do this trick, and so ripping a film usually takes longer than the length of the film. Which sucks.

The Arrow discs actually made it! Intact! Pandion figured out how to deliver a package (slower than USPS could in the same time frame, what's the selling point of their service again?) and despite the packing job being pretty shit (discs crammed loose into an oversized cardboard box with a lump of void fill air packs stuffed on top, they were rattling around in there) they somehow arrived with not a dent on them! I suppose then, if I had anything nice to say about Pandion, it would be that they don't seem to dropkick packages?

Anyways, the discs! I only realized after placing my order that they're all Italian horror, haha.

• Shock (1977) on BD, a Mario Bava flick. I don't think I've seen any of his stuff but this one comes highly recommended. I find Arrow's new art for the box... irritating. Like it looks fine, but it also looks too modern, like if you look at that cover you wouldn't think it was for a 70s movie. Fortunately the disc box under that slipcover is reversible and the first thing I did was turn it inside out to reveal the much better original poster art (shown above). Includes a cute little booklet tucked inside the plastic case!

• Profondo Rosso aka Deep Red (1975) on 4K, in the "Arte Originale" limited box set, whixh features the original Italian poster on the hardcase. I already own Arrow's standard BD of this, but it only includes the Italian cut, with gaps in the English soundtrack just switching to Italian randomly. Arrow for some reason only released the English export cut on 4K, forcing me to buy this set. They FORCED me, guys, I totally didn't want to use this opportunity to check out the quality of their fancy limited box set releases (they're very nice). It comes with some cool art cards in the plastic disc box, and packed in the hardcase alongside the disc box is a double-sided poster and a lengthy booklet with essays and details on the transfer. I actually still haven't gotten to watching this Argento classic but I have a feeling that might be something I fix tomorrow.

• Contamination (1980), an unashamed Alien knockoff with exploding organs and silly bullshit galore. Just gory shlock from what I've seen of it. This is an old release, old enough to include a DVD with the Blu-ray! No fancy booklets here (Arrow tends to stop including those after a release has been in production for a certain length of time).

Overall happy with these and can't wait to check them all out. I've also placed a small order from Arrow UK - their 4K of Cinema Paradiso and their fancy hardcase box set of The House By the Cemetery on 4K - unfortunately missed out on the "Arte Originale" variant of that one, but at least the standard cover art doesn't look stupid. Can't wait to receive those in like a month or however long it takes those international packages to arrive haha.