Quick note to let you know that some Fox UHD Blu-rays are now in the hands of consumers thanks to Fox Connect and none of them (Martian included) contains a Dolby Atmos soundtrack.
This is really bad news coming from Fox and a really disservice to the format launch sadly. I hope they will fix this on future releases.
Just a quick post to let you know that some UHD Blu-ray players have been released starting yesterday and that it seems that Bestbuy preorders are starting to ship over the weekend.
If you want a first peek at what’s inside the box and at the menu, I encourage you to visit this discussion on AVSForums.
It will take a couple of weeks for my pre-order to arrive here in Canada, but I’ll let you know as soon as I can try the player.
Quick update : I now have both the player and two discs (Martian / Maze Runner: Scorch Trials) in hands and will be doing some testing over the weekend, I’ll give you some impressions soon.
Just a quick note to confirm we have one more new movie coming up on UHD Blu-ray, The 5th Wave from Sony Pictures.
I’ll add the details once they become available.
Lionsgate is still showing its strong support of immersive audio with the confirmation that The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 Blu-ray will feature a Dolby Atmos soundtrack when released on March 22nd.
There is also confirmation in the press release that a UltraHD Blu-ray version is on its way, but its official date have not been confirmed yet. I am going to assume this will also have Atmos on it .
As usual, I updated the list of Blu-ray movies with Atmos on the site.
If we believe pre-order information from Amazon Canada, two more UHD Blu-rays have been confirmed : Concussion from Sony Pictures and Hunger Games : Mockingjay Part 2.
I’ll update this post once there is a more official confirmation including if the titles will include immersive audio tracks.
Meanwhile I added both titles to the list of Ultra HD Blu-ray coming up in the next months.
You can now count Lions Gate in the list of studios supporting Ultra HD titles. The studio just announced that their first 4 titles will be available starting March 1st and that all will include immersive audio. The launch titles are :
This means we have a first DTS:X title on UHD Blu-ray now and that Atmos is continuing to be omnipresent on the format.
I updated at the same time the list of UltraHD titles, the list of Dolby Atmos Blu-rays and the list of DTS:X Blu-rays.
According to Amazon and Blu-ray.com, it seems that March 1st is the release date for the first group of Fox UltraHD Blu-ray titles. As already reported the titles are :
No detail on technical specs yet including audio formats, but we shall know soon enough.
Update: Journey to Space now have a date. According to Amazon it will be released on June7th.
You can add Shout Factory to the list of supporters of 4K UltraHD Blu-ray with the announcement of six IMZX movies (dates to be confirmed) :
I’m curious to understand why some studios like Disney and Universal are still waiting to announce any plans…
In addition to the Samsung player, Best Buy and Amazon in the US now have the first UltraHD Blu-ray discs up for pre-oder.
With this, comes the tentative announcement of three more titles :
The thing that is really compelling here is that a lot of the announced movies from the studios were missed opportunities for Atmos on Blu-ray, so there’s a big hope that we can finally have immersive audio on the titles (note that Fox confirmed they will not include the track on Blu-ray, what a bad move).
Of the currently known movie that will be released in UHD here are the ones that I hope will finally get the Atmos treatment at home :
As you can see, this is a LOT of potential for Dolby Atmos at home with a lot of great titles. I specially look forward for the Maze Runner titles as they already have impressive soundtracks in 7.1.
There is finally a tentative timeline for the release of the first UltraHD Blu-ray player from Samsung, the UBD-K8500. Samsung reported in their conference a release date of Mid-February 2016 with a pre-order pricing of 399$ and a MSRP of 499$.
The other good news is that the player will feature dual HDMI outputs so you can use your non HDCP 2.2 compliant AV receiver to playback sound in high resolution formats.
Please note that the manual for the player is already online here.
